Seriously random: Love those legs either way

Thanks for the extremely and to some extent unanticipatedly positive responses to the previous post. Still working on part IV, which I promise is coming up. Not enough visuality on this blog lately, so I offer you a visual moment I like very much from one of Strike Back‘s most painful scenes:

John Porter (Richard Armitage) asks Kenneth Bratton (David Butler) for a job after his discharge from the army. Source: Richard Armitage Central Gallery

This is SO random. I found this moment of this scene sort of electrifying and couldn’t figure out why. It just finally occurred to me.

In the U.S. if you watch movies about the military you start to expect that the heroes will be just slightly bowlegged. I don’t know why that should be the case, but it’s true that I expect to see it and that I find it just a leetle bit sexy.

Mr. Armitage is emphatically not bowlegged, as we can see from this promotional photo of season 3 Guy of Gisborne, even though Armitage places Guy in a very slight contrapposto. Not the greatest example of Mr. Armitage’s exemplary skeletal structure, but a great picture (see “more visuality,” above):

Richard Armitage as Guy of Gisborne in a promotional photo for series 3 of Robin Hood. Source: Fanpop.com

Looking at his left leg you can see that he does not have even a slight bow to either femur or tibia. Thank you, Mr. & Mrs. Armitage, for the good genes and for making sure your son was eating a diet rich in Vitamin D and calcium. (And thanks for feeding him in general so he could grow up to be so tall! Even if he doesn’t always appreciate it. I’m sure it was an expensive endeavour to build that whole body.) The legs can also look bowed if the knees are hyperextended. But I bet that all those years of dancing lessons and then the Alexander technique also stressed proper standing posture, so that we almost never see Mr. Armitage standing with his knee joint(s) hyperextended. Thank you, teachers of Mr. Armitage, for helping him to avoid adopting a posture that is rarely a good idea and can lead members of a wedding party who are unaccustomed to standing for long periods of time to fall down in a dead faint during an August wedding.

OK, but what got me about the first picture is that John Porter looks just very slightly bowlegged. This is a combination of this particular camera angle on his body, which makes Armitage’s legs look thinner than they really are (he’s standing neither frontally nor in profile but somewhere in between), the funny bagging of these particular trousers, and the appearance that Mr. Armitage actually has his knees overextended — which in my experience of photos of him is extremely rare.

So due to my troping of bowleggedness, Porter just looks really masculine to me in this photo. This post is a good example of academic overanalysis. I should have just written, “Look at his legs in this photo! Aren’t they cool?” But I am sort of constitutionally incapable of writing so little.

And if this weren’t such a distressing scene, noting this oddity would actually be jocular. Another interesting effect created by Mr. Armitage’s tallness: because Armitage has to bow down into the conversation with Bratton, he enhances our perception of John Porter’s humiliation — John almost has to bow his head to speak with Bratton. Though he was Bratton’s savior, he now has to beg for a favor. A really moving scene.

OK, both the ‘rents are in bed now, so time to rush off for a late-night viewing of as much of North & South as I can get in before I fall asleep.

~ by Servetus on June 6, 2010.