Stalking Armitage? (and weekly obsession update)

Halberstadt Cathedral, or: why my whole face is peeling

Wow, I wander around central Germany with a grad student and look what happens in the comments! 🙂 I come back sunburned AND edified, that’s what. As a few of those commentators wrote, the level of discourse in the comments is a really energizing thing about this blog. I always look forward to reading what you all have written. Your ideas cast light on my own musings and trigger new thoughts. You are a literate, thoughtful crowd, O readers.

And as usual, you were very helpful in your remarks on the previous post. I started responding individually and then thought I might as well make this a separate post since the main thing I took away from trying to reply was that some aspects of my theatrical fantasy were not entirely clear, even to me. What was bugging me enough to make it worth writing about? Your remarks helped me clarify this quite a bit, although I was surprised by the results. The other main theme in the discussion seemed to be the question of when fascination / obsession turns into stalking. I’m somewhat less clear on this point, but I’ve also discussed it below. I continue to maintain that I am not stalking Richard Armitage, but perhaps I’m wrong.

A brief detour: my musings on this topic are being substituted for the weekly obsession update. I won’t be writing one this week, because I had little free time and very little opportunity to consume Mr. Armitage’s work. The mentoring, while not ridiculously time consuming, ate up most of the space that I usually spend Armitaging, and fleeing the rather severe heat without aid of air conditioning except in the rare books reading room ate up the rest. So I was very fragmented — we’re talking snippets on youtube while the morning thought-gathering was happening. The LOTN package is here and sadly unopened. I guess that at least I can claim that I am not yet neglecting real world tasks in order to stare at pictures of Mr. Armitage on the computer screen. I am linking throughout to various past statements of my own and to comments that I am responding to from the previous post.

So: many thanks for the comments, ad quod respondeo:

I. The troublesome theatrical fantasy

The last post was muddled. It wasn’t clear why I’d find it ok to travel to London and watch a play in which Mr. Armitage plays a major role (I wouldn’t go over if he were playing Angus in MacBeth), perhaps repeatedly (justifiable, I think, if one makes an extremely long journey), but why, for me, sending flowers seems like it might be stepping over the line and why I’d cringe at even contemplating lurking at the stage door or trying to meet him in person. Of course, the decision to travel to see Armitage perform does not take place in a vacuum; my own decision can only be read in the contexts of such decisions made by all of Mr. Armitage’s fans past and present. Thus all of the perspectives are valuable to me as a new fan who hasn’t participated in the discussion boards and is unfamiliar with the larger narrative of how Mr. Armitage’s relationship to his admirers has developed.

Just as attitudes about how to interact with Armitage have changed over time, so my own position on what to blog here has developed. Early posts (in February and March 2010) drew more explicitly on the theme of dreams and fantasies and my curiosity about random intersections of moments in my life with those in that of Mr. Armitage. Though I still do that occasionally, especially on Sundays, my day of the week for placing and pondering the location of the important figures in my life, I largely drew back from it when, after only about two weeks of blogging, I got more readers after suddenly and kindly being included by Nat in the Fanstravaganza, and started to post more detailed and critical observations about Armitage’s work. I think the turn occurred partly because as an academic, I am trained as a heavily analytical thinker, but also because of the increased readership. At first, the limited number of commentators made me feel as if I were in conversation with a small group of people, admittedly people I didn’t know and will probably never meet, but as the hits soared I started to feel less intimate about what I was writing. At that point I also embraced a stance common among Mr. Armitage’s more thoughtful fans: that we should back off because his frustration with pressure from his fans or behavior he finds disturbing might push him away from acting. In light of that conclusion, although it’s turned out to be self-contradictory, I also thought writing more substantive posts would demonstrate that this blog wasn’t just a narcissistic way to out-fangrrrrrrrrrrrl my fellow fangrrrls. And, of course, as a poststructuralist manqué, I reveal a great deal of my own positions in the attempt to be self-reflexive, though a true poststructuralist would call writing about why a picture moves one as opposed to just posting a picture to drool over a dodge rather than a meaningful distinction.

I’m still working on resolving this issue, as I think discussing my fantasies more directly would be helpful. But I didn’t edge away from fantasy posts because I thought (or think) that it is inherently wrong either to have Armitage-related fantasies or to blog about mine. I do feel that I must identify them explicitly as belonging to me and take responsibility for them. I try to be as honest with myself as I can here (given the constraints of pseudonymous blogging in relationship to concerns about revealing my real world identity) and so if I write something that’s problematic, I need to face up to it and not excuse it on any grounds. I am writing what I think; not, for instance, what a story or character demands from me. The content of my fantasies is therapeutically significant to me; as I said at the very beginning of the blog, looking at Mr. Armitage and his work has become a lens for looking at my life. And as one commentator aptly noted, common sense and practicality are not the only standards for decision-making. Sometimes fulfilling a fantasy has the potential, if not to change one’s life, then at least to give one a great deal of life-influencing satisfaction. To fulfill a fantasy one must articulate it, even if the very act of writing it out is risky.

The contrast in this video by bccmee between the innocent Vicar of Dibley scenes and the frustrated obsessive love affair song effectively portrays one of Servetus’s central quandaries as blogger. Can affection ever be innocent? Is Geraldine stalking Harry? Love, love, love this video and the questions it raises. H/t RAFrenzy. Go to youtube and give bccmee some love.

Rhetorically, this essay now requires me to explain what exactly Armitage fantasy does for me. This question is really hard to answer; it’s the central question of this blog and so I can’t encapsulate it here, but a most poignant post from a new commentor gets at it quite well in its more general form. I won’t quote her on the surface here, in case she’s shy, but Mary Lou is absolutely right that there’s a way in which our fantasies help to make life tolerable or even beautiful; that they allow us to realize at least temporarily elements of life not achievable on the sodden ground most of us tread from day to day. They thus constitute central elements of our lives, and unsurprisingly, we invest a great deal in protecting them. I began watching Armitage at a particularly low point and some days in January and February, thinking about  North & South did allow me to creep from bed. The film both confirmed some of my deepest fantasies and lent me some new ones in a way that motivated me. It’s thus not surprising to me that someone could abruptly change course when a fantasy she had been cultivating — apparently one very problematic to its object — was demolished through exposure to the bright light of day. For many people, fantasy is just as important as, or more important than, reality. To me that explains why the theatrical fantasy presents such problems: it is hugely intoxicating, precisely because it masquerades under a patina of reality and suggests that fantasy could become real. This effect is similar to the lure of realfic — the possibility that one could know someone by writing him as a character. At the same time, however, it forces the two elements together in unpredictable ways. I hold heavy influence on my fantasies but little on my day-to-day experiences, especially as they involve the often incalculable actions of (gasp) other people.

Hence the danger. “Real life” fantasies, in which the person who writes Servetus and the real Armitage meet as ourselves, force the simultaneous experience of certain inescapable but perhaps irresolvable stances. At the hypothetical theatre, the actual Servetus stands at a stage door and the real Mr. Armitage exits one; my fantasy about Mr. Armitage as a person collides in that alley with his fantasies about the appropriate way for his admirers to treat and feel about him. Given the inherent problems this sort of thinking brings with it, in order for this style of fantasy to achieve the desired effect of elevation from the ordinary for me, a scenario requires a high level of believability, i.e., the meeting itself may be coincidental but it must be possible, and during the meeting, both of us need to act in ways we credibly would in a non-fantasy situation.

Thus I don’t have many of these, as any real-life meeting between us is so improbable; no chance, for example, that I’d run into him on the tube. One is an anti-fantasy in which I meet him on an airplane and decide not to speak to him. The second is more detailed, but even less probable and really rather boring. Perhaps I’ll post it someday. There’s nothing really risqué about it, though, as (apparently) neither the real Armitage nor (definitely) the real Servetus have casual sex. Seriously, folks, even if the impossible circumstance occurred in which the real Richard Armitage were in the presence of the real me (who is several orders of magnitude less physically attractive than the real him) and expressed interest in having sex after having met only seconds earlier, I don’t think I could bring myself to do it. I’m not very virtuous; I am a fornicator (or serial monogamist, as the magazines call it these days); but my upbringing has stuck with me to the extent that I, like Mr. Armitage, don’t “put it about.” (I had to look up what that meant.) So no worries; this fantasy is not about me throwing myself at him, and presumably, if Mr. Armitage were in the habit of taking advantage of overeager fans, we’d have heard about it already. I find promiscuity hugely unattractive, probably unattractive enough for it to put me off blogging him. 

Andrew (Joe McFadden) takes the opportunity to ruin Carol’s (Sarah Smart) rather sober wedding to John (Richard Armitage) by informing her that Lisa Meg (Holliday Grainger) knows who her mother is in Sparkhouse 3. Obsessive? Source: Richard Armitage Net

So the theatrical fantasy is one of only a few I’ve had in which the real Servetus and the real Armitage as they are in real life could intersect — and assuming that Mr. Armitage does actually sign to do a stage play in London, it is the most realistic. He could be committed to appear on a stage where I could see him act regularly (assuming he weren’t ill or indisposed). I would be granted a certain kind of access to him for the price of a theatre ticket, so that no social contract would be broken. The great part for me would be observing him work at (relatively) close range, making all kinds of observations, testing them out at later performances, and then writing about it. Frankly, I have no qualms about that. It’s a ticketed event, and he’s paid to act in front of audiences — just as I am paid to lecture on various themes and episodes in the history of the West, and anyone can come to listen. I don’t see why it would be an issue that I went to more than one performance (since presumably the goal of a stage production is to sell tickets, and since I’ve watched other performances of his dozens of times on DVD), or that I wrote about it, as long as I were honest and professional. That’s what theatre reviewers do; they write about theatrical performances.

I can’t imagine that he’d recognize me even if he saw me at more than one performance. No picture of me appears on this blog. Fewer than ten pictures have been taken of me since 1995, none of which are connected with this alias. I’ve never visited a tv set he’s been on, and would be unlikely to unless I had some guarantee that I’d get to see him from afar, as I don’t find watching repetitive takes especially interesting. I don’t want my picture taken with him; as the remark above should indicate I don’t like having my picture taken, period. I have never sent him a gift nor written to him directly, and in the past, anyway, have expressed the opinion that I was unlikely to do so, precisely because it seemed to me, as I wrote at the time, that anything beyond the trivial, anything that makes me “me” in writing to him nullifies the point of the fan letter — it makes it about me instead of about him — and that fan letters that do more than say “good job” create an uncomfortable level of obligation for the recipient. I have written some letters to him on this blog, but they, too, are more statements about me or performance reviews than really directed at him — at most, they ask questions of him that I assume he could not or would not answer, which makes them pointless as actual letters directed to him since they will never receive answers. I wouldn’t use my time in London to try to track him down away from the theatre. Those are all lines that I won’t cross, and that I don’t find in the least tempting. 

Lucas North (Richard Armitage), apparently unnoticed, as he stares in pain and longing at Elizaveta and her child from a distance in Spooks 7.2. Stalking? Source: Richard Armitage Net

It gets more complicated, though, when I think about either sending flowers before a performance or standing outside a stage door to request an autograph that he could give me. Those two things trouble me most about the possibility of going to London; they tempt and repel me in equal measure. Of course, if I were to go to the stage door, I certainly wouldn’t shout my blogging alias or wear a t-shirt with the name of the blog on it, and I wouldn’t try to give him anything in person. (He’d be foolish to accept it, and I’m a bit surprised when I read thanks for various food gifts in some of his early messages.) The money I’d have to spend does play a role, as well as the sheer craziness of such a decision, but the real problem is that potentially, anyway, I could come face to face with the object of my blogging attentions and personal preoccupations of the moment. It’s not so much that I fear that he would disappoint either in person (though who wouldn’t want to verify the frequent claim that he’s even more lovely in person than on screen?) or as a thespian — as many have noted, his professionalism shows up even when he’s essentially just an extra.

As usual, then, I think that the conflict I feel is not about Mr. Armitage, but that it’s somehow about me, and several problems arise. Thus, the question that I asked at the end of the last post was the wrong one: it’s not, Can the real Richard Armitage really live up to my fantasies about him? but rather, what do my concerns about the validity of my fantasies about him tell me about my own insecurities?

For instance, if I went there, if I did those things, then I would be a fangrrrl drooling for attention just like any other. As long as I sit here, pseudonymously, behind my computer screen, I can kid myself into thinking that I’m just analyzing things I see, that I’m not part of them. (Another common cognitive error, according to modern rhetorical analysis.) Even sitting in the front of the stage, watching the production, I can hide behind my doctorate and dignify what I’m doing as analysis and not fantasy. But giving in to the impulse even just of glimpsing Richard Armitage as Richard Armitage would make me: what? A member of the human race?

Or maybe it’s that we’re both just shy. The topos of Armitage’s lack of desire to be in public as himself (“Richard Armitage will never appear as Richard Armitage on tv“) is quite standard now, and part of his appeal. Perhaps as an actor, one has to learn quickly to divide between self and character, though Armitage has also reported having experienced difficulty with this line. I sympathize with him. As I got to this point of this post I became queasier and queasier. It’s because I realized that throughout the above materials I’ve been shifting perspectives between Dr. Servetus (“the real me”) and Servetus, the “me + richard armitage” blogger. I went back through to try to clarify, but I’m not sure I can.

Thus, if put to the test, I’m not sure I can say who would be standing out back of the theatre in my fantasy, waiting for Mr. Armitage to exit. Would it be Dr. Servetus, who has no Armitage-related excesses on her conscience, who could just smile innocuously, claim credibly to be a nice history professor from Texas who admires Restoration drama, and then ask politely for an autograph? But Dr. Servetus has no real connection with Richard Armitage, no reason to fly thousands of miles to see him perform. She assigned that impulse to the blogger Servetus, who may be too ashamed to raise her head in the presence of her wish-object and who has repeatedly drawn a rather strict line at contacting her hero (even with flowers) or at actually getting to meet Mr. Armitage, which she has stated she will not do. Watching Armitage perform on stage is as close as Servetus the blogger can get without transgressing the boundaries of that persona. Which raises the next problem — which is so hard to admit. Of course Servetus the blogger is a mechanism that Dr. Servetus created to deal with her obsession. Servetus the blogger has been endowed by her creator with shame, but behind her stands Dr. Servetus with all of her even more frightening emotions. In thinking about a stage door visit, Dr. Servetus thus threatens to compromise the persona of Servetus the blogger.

So the real issue that makes a stage-door appearance a problem is that I still don’t understand the role that Mr. Armitage in all his guises plays as a fantasy for Dr. Servetus and whose meaning in my currently rather turmoil-ridden life the blogger Servetus is trying to clarify. Servetus the blogger has to work her magic and her essential stance–which Dr. Servetus defined in the first place–back onto Dr. Servetus, or we’ll both be sunk. Dr. Servetus can’t afford the possibility that the lens she discovered in his work for looking at her life might suddenly become blurry; Servetus the blogger has to try to enforce this boundary, even if Dr. Servetus still doesn’t understand it.

I hope I haven’t succeeded only in convincing you all and me that I am crazy.

It’s legitimate in closing this section to ask where all this contemplation leaves Mr. Armitage. Armitage naturally owes the Servetuses nothing and still enjoys the right to be who he is for himself and in his own life. I’m grateful for everything he does. But he as he really is has a limited relevance to me except as he supplies fodder for my perception of him. Who he is for me, the role he plays in my fantasies, has become so important that right now I need that mirror against which to measure myself. I can’t risk breaking it right now by actually meeting the man. 

In the best of all possible worlds, my problems would have no impact on him. I could admire him and he could be blissfully ignorant. And yet this blog, so necessary for my sanity, makes that impossible. It’s clear that Mr. Armitage cannot want what I am supplying here and that indeed he might feel pressured by it. He reports himself as hostile to being put on a pedestal: “‘I don’t think actors need to go on pedestals. I don’t buy it,’ he says. ‘I think it’s a weird thing. It’s like you become someone else, like stepping into another universe.'”

You are right, Mr. Armitage. As the object of fantasy, you exist in the universe of Dr. Servetus and Servetus the blogger, perhaps in slightly different guises, each of which has only tangentially to do with you as Richard Armitage. I can imagine that this circumstance makes you uneasy because you are not really as you are in my fantasies. But I’ll concede that I desperately need you to stay on that pedestal. I’ll do my best to keep you there by staying away from the actual you, so that I at least don’t remind you of the position you occupy in my life. And should the contents of this blog disturb you, consider the possibility that you are not really part of the intended audience, either for my fantasies, or for this blog, which is defined as fans of yours with an interest in my perspective on you.

Tracy (Vinette Robinson), after she approaches Paul Andrews (Richard Armitage) at his home in violation of her probation agreement, in Between the Sheets 1.2. Source: Richard Armitage Central Gallery

II. Stalking via blog?

Now that I’ve determined one personal line for myself above, and explained it, I’m naturally confronted with the general problem of this blog and the high level of scrutiny it directs at Mr. Armitage, his work, and his personal appearances, as well as the rather open stance I take about my own reactions to these things. This blog could certainly be described as a sort of obsessive person-watching. As the repository of the fantasy and admiration that Armitage finds so problematic, this blog both preserves a line between me and him, and challenges that line every day. So: Is writing this blog the equivalent of stalking?

First, I agree absolutely that stalking in any form is terrible — and that the stalkee is the one who defines when he or she is being stalked. In similar ways to those described by some commentors, my own very minor celebrity as a well-liked professor on a large campus occasionally creates situations with students who don’t understand boundaries and I dislike such experiences immensely even at such a tiny level. Though I don’t want to discuss it here at all, I will also state that I was sexually harrassed by a superior in AY 2007-8 in a situation that I felt powerless to influence, and that that experience has had pernicious effects on my life. If I got a verifiable msg from Mr. Armitage or one of his agents stating that he experienced this blog as harrassment or stalking and asking me to stop blogging, I would make the entire blog up to that point private and stew with my own thoughts immediately and indefinitely, though I might try to write something else about him that was more limited in scope. (Insofar as all posts are not like this one, I actually tend to think that anyone who provides intelligent coverage of his work and career does him a favor, but won’t exclude the possibility that I am deluding myself. It wouldn’t be the first time.)

Maybe it’s too fine of a distinction, but I see the writing I do here as intimately connected to the method of my own academic writing. Before I write about anything for work, I collect as many sources as I can, and I attempt an exhaustive survey of them in all their depth and breadth. I try to make sure I understand every work and every moment of each one. I think about parts in relationship to the whole, and about discernable patterns and motifs. I reassemble my thoughts and then write using the level of detail most important to the argument I will make. All of those academic activities are replicated here.

In order to be an academic, one must indeed be a bit obsessive about the topic of one’s research. Like Richard Armitage, that topic has to be interesting enough to drag one back to one’s desk every day. One might object that in academic writing one doesn’t typically write about one’s own feelings quite so much; I’d modify that by arguing that those elements are still there, but more hidden than they are on this blog. Thus our joking about the Royal Institute of Armitage Studies hides a grain of truth or at least a similarity between fascination with a topic and academic research. Because of the role Mr. Armitage plays in my fantasy life, because I’ve become transfixed, I’m responding with the only mechanism I know how to use: intense, detailed analysis. It’s true that most of my research subjects have been dead for half a millennium, but many historians write about people who are still alive. In other words I don’t think that close readings of Armitage in themselves constitute stalking. Indeed, by providing close readings of Armitage, I argue that his work is inherently worthy of academic analysis, that it is more than “mere” entertainment.

Even if you don’t buy this argument, I still don’t think I am stalking here, though I have been accused of it and when that happened I thought about it and journaled about it extensively. The primary final distinction is that I do not, nor have I ever, sought to use any of this material to create a personal relationship with Mr. Armitage. As stated above, I have not ever written Mr. Armitage a fan letter or contacted him in any way. I am not looking for any reaction, positive or negative, from him. And as long as the blurry boundary between Dr. Servetus and Servetus the blogger is unclear, I’m not going to be in a position to speak to him without jeopardizing the very things about the fantasy of him that are most important to me.

Indeed, I think that paradoxically it’s my very openness here that prevents this obsession from ever developing into true stalking behavior. I thought about this when I pushed “publish” on the last of the clothing posts. “Now,” I thought, “you’ll never be able to try to meet the man in person. Because even if he didn’t know that you were the author of all of that stuff, you would.”

It’s time to stop writing, before this all becomes even more convoluted. If you read all this, thanks for your patience. I promise the next posts will be more light-hearted.

This is where I’ll be till Friday morning … it’s supposed to be 35°C tomorrow.

~ by Servetus on July 14, 2010.