By popular demand: hot SB video, in case you haven’t seen it yet

StrikeBack Viral from seanographic.co.uk HD on Vimeo.This is confusing. It shows up in my posting window but not in preview. OK, I can’t embed for reasons I don’t understand. I’m not exactly a computer whiz. I’m doing this to help the video get as much exposure as it can. And because Violet wanted to figure out what is so compelling about it. I wanted just to embed it on the blog surface and then walk away this morning, but as I watched it I got sucked in. So I went to the rare books reading room first before looking at the rest of my Armitage correspondence. To prove that I could just walk away from Mr. Armitage at any time. Yeah. (Cough.)

It is really hot. Watching it definitely makes me sticky (or maybe that’s the humidity in Lower Saxony right now. Though it rained this afternoon, thank G-d). If you haven’t looked at it, it’s worth the minute it takes. It belongs to the genre of apocrypha about John Porter (it’s Mr. Armitage as Porter, but not a scene from the series; it’s also not a fanvid that cuts together scenes from the series). It takes me longer to think about these things than it should, and I have only watched this maybe a dozen or so times, so your reactions thoughts below on plot, aesthetics, intertextuality, dynamics will be much appreciated. I am not sure I am seeing the video as the auteur intended, as over the internet it looked and sounded choppy, and it was even harder to watch once I had downloaded it. I have had to make some inferences about how it was intended to be seen. Damn Vista. (ETA: about halfway through writing this I discovered that if I turned off HD I got a much better impression of the whole piece, but the choppiness of the HD version pointed my attention to a few things anyway. Go figure.) All caps mine, from the original video by Sean Pruen.

I. Superficial aesthetic notes

Off the top of my head: like iz4blue, love khakis and the stepped-back color scheme. Occasionally the camera makes his skin look hyperreal, almost like a videogame, as here:

These brief really high resolution shots are contrasted with a more general grittiness throughout that evokes the mood of Porter’s captivity with Katie Dartmouth in Strike Back 1.2, as here:

John Porter (Richard Armitage) convincing Katie Darthmouth that they’ll escape, in Strike Back 1.2. I’m pretty sure the original source was Richard Armitage Central Gallery, but they redid all their caps after the DVD came out. Their present gallery is here. Posting this mostly because I love it, and because I am the blogger, I can.

The bondage theme of the film (Porter tied to a chair, wrists in raspy rope, hook to aid in torture sessions next to him) is totally gauged to the sort of thing that provoked frissons in the 1980s — it’s amazing how many citations of those early Madonna videos one still sees — and as in many of Armitage’s roles I felt that the producer was appealing directly to my teenage aesthetic. Putting him in fatigues in this particular bound position emphasizes the massive, static thighs — you know how I feel about that — as for much of the video they don’t move, and the major muscle group that we see moving is the shoulders. Though I can’t imagine it was intentional, the fly of these particular fatigues catches the lightest shade of the camo, so that it’s outlined every time we see it, as here:

  

II: The “story”

As a structured piece, the video intrigues because we see the character all alone, in a sustained narrative sequence. This technique is fairly unusual in Strike Back, which shows Porter alone for limited periods — as in 1.1, where we see him alone at the veterans’ memorial, as a security guard, working out in his impoverished lodgings, etc. There, these brief scenes without the presence of an implied other usually indicate either plot points or mood. It’s also unusual in terms of Mr. Armitage’s preferences; he’s stated that he’s not interested in a one-man show just because characters emerge fully in their encounters with others. So the video repurposes a technique used in the film for different purposes to undertake a radically different task than the film. Mr. Armitage is starring here in the dreaded one-man show, and the point of the video seems to be characterization: the video wants to tell us something about John Porter. In order to do so, its compressed narrative makes veiled allusions to the captivity and waterboarding scenes of Strike Back 1.2 along with Porter’s screaming rage of the helicopter scene near the end when As’ad is left behind in the Iraqi desert. The video works in a way akin to the dream sequence in Strike Back 1.3, in which fantasy and reality elements of Porter’s memories are used as a method of characterization. The significance of this insight becomes clearest near the end of the video, so watch for this theme to come back.

Armitage naturally knows that in a one-man show, the solo actor has to create and make present the other characters as well. The invisibility of the other character thus focuses our attention more strongly on Porter as we have to get twice as much information from him. Porter not only tells us his own story; he offers vital clues as to the narrative arc of the video in terms of the other as well. We’re used to looking closely at Armitage, but this plotting technique necessarily intensifies our attention. Even were he not so good looking, the narrative style means that we couldn’t stop staring if we wanted to.

Just as Armitage creates his interlocutor via audience extrapolations, the video makes a lot of points by implication. Hence, for example, the repeated editing cuts to images of Porter’s bound hands struggling painfully against the ropes, occasionally enhanced by black marks that imply perhaps dirt, perhaps wounds on the hands. Thus, though we never see him being tortured, the piece tells us with subtle visual cues that that’s what’s happening. Porter’s implied other character is the captor / torturer, whom we don’t see, but who is symbolized by implication in our field of vision by the presence of the chain and hook slightly to Porter’s rear.

Though this symbol puts the implied other metaphorically in our field of vision, when Porter responds his demands, he speaks forward, toward the frontal camera position, which is the implied location of the other. This juxtaposition creates the impression that Porter is surrounded by threats, and hence vulnerable. We might thus consider that the extreme uprightness of the figure in the shot above speaks both of his resolution not to break and of a posture taken defensively against the risk of breaking. It’s all he can do, as his legs are by implication tied, splayed apart, throughout the entire sequence, thus maximizing Porter’s physical vulnerability and forced openness to the demands of the captor / torturer. (Actually, Armitage’s feet don’t seem to have been tied; he creates a slight continuity problem in that he sometimes places them toward the back of the chair, while other times they line up with the chair’s front legs, but he successfully creates the impression of bound legs if you don’t look too closely, as he keeps Porter’s legs splayed throughout the sequence until he breaks free from the ropes — facilitating the break-free was presumably the reason he couldn’t really be secured to the chair. But we end up believing that he is, which is the main point.) Also important to note here: in that shot above, the birdseye view of Porter, the viewpoint of the implicit other is shared with our viewpoint as spectator. Later, these stances will diverge and then meet up again. 

But back to weakness. The vulnerability of Porter’s pose, of course, is reflected in the subtle but expressive acting we see throughout, in Armitage’s ability to reveal for just a fraction of a second a facial expression of weakness, fear, humiliation, or surprise. Most of these revelations are not really microexpressions because we can easily and readily see them. However, when we do get a frontal shot of his face as he answers his captor’s questions, we sense several microexpressions, as at approximately 0:05ff. (These times are inexact, as they seem fall differently on the actual video than on the screencaps.) At 0:06, for instance, his right eye narrows almost imperceptibly; when the camera cuts away from this shot around 0:10 he lowers his chin just marginally, as if bracing himself for what he fears may be coming. The most obvious one occurs at 0:08 or 0:09, in this portion of the video:

Just as Porter is saying “that,” he blinks, and the blinking makes the remainder of his face look really tired. (I’d never have noticed this if the HD hadn’t hung me up on it a couple of times.)

The combined impression is thus of both anger and exhaustion.

As the video moves forward, exhaustion eventually gives way to anger and anger to vengefulness. The general narrative arc of the piece thus moves Porter from vulnerability to strength, so after its allusion to the interrogation episode above, in which Porter still seems to be speaking with autonomy and power, the video must work hard to establish Porter’s subjection, for instance, beginning at 0:14, where Porter struggles against his bonds, and at 0:15-16, where he is seen shaking his head slightly. Here again the microexpressions are of fatigue:

The attempt of the implied other to establish authority over Porter begins at 0:18, when he is doused with water and attempts to shake it off, leading us to a series of shots that show him reacting to, rather than mastering, his situation:

Note the bitten lip, above.
Here, a slight gasp in response to the inundation.

Another abbreviated upper lip sighting that establishes the emotionality of his response.

In each case Armitage shields Porter’s gaze from the camera and presumably from the implicit other, thus grounding his subjection and vulnerability in this scene but also establishing a basis for his resistance. He refuses to comply with the demands of the unseen other by showing his eyes to him while he is being humiliated. We only see Porter in abject position in camera shots from a position slightly to the right of the position where the captor / torturer appears to be. The editor thus appears to give the viewer his or her own perspective, which lets us see Porter’s humiliation and suffering, but hides it from the implicit other. The writhing of the hands, which is also the editor’s signal of Porter’s subordination, is also completely hidden from the captor /torturer position and visible only to us. And it looks like it hurts.

The resulting perception of vulnerability not only attracts us in sympathy to the bound figure, it plays a second role — in turn, it enhances our reception of the physical power and potential brutality of Porter here, because Armitage regularly moves Porter from these brief vignettes of weakness or humiliation into intense rage. In particular, when we look closely, we can often see the intense strain in the muscles and tendons of his neck. For instance, beginning at 0:32, when his head is lowered and he looks abject:

to the back of 0:32, where his head moves upward explosively (I can see it but not cap it), into 0:33, where we’ve got essentially three  complete separate motions going on, scream, duck / struggle, scream:

But at 0:35, apparently without any editing, Porter’s position is pulled back quickly into subjection — note the barely perceptible but threatening presence of the hook at the right margin of the cap:

Sometimes Pruen aids in creating this great contrast between vulnerability and power, for instance by taking on the vantage point of what the captor / torturer must be thinking, as at 0:40, where Pruen inserts another picture of the bowed head, the eyes turned down rom under the brow, taken from above to emphasize the superiority of  the captor / torturer, but also to show Porter’s resistance to directing his gaze at his tormentor:

but which is then followed by another explosive sequence that demonstrates Porter’s rage:

Why so much rage, and why do we not read it as overplayed at this point? I think that this step compensates for the problem of the one-man show that Armitage hedged around in the Vulpes Libris interview linked above — that a one-man show is to a dialogue as masturbation is to sex. Although you may achieve a good result, you will never be surprised as you might with another player or a sexual partner, as you already know everything that is in your head and can never be surprised by yourself. The characterization of the implied other can never be surprising to the actor — so he has to do something via his own reactions to the implied other to surprise the audience. The ferocity of these responses and the intensity with which Armitage plays them thus makes us ask: who is the implied other, and what is he doing to provoke such animus?

At this point in the video, the editor starts to combine the two perspectives — that of the implicit other, captor and torturer, from the front, and “ours,” from the side, so that instead of seeing refusal to comply vs. abjectness, we begin to see the defiance that Porter is showing his captor from our own perspective. Porter’s reactions to the other and his perception by the audience are thus unified by the camera perspective. The shot of what the captor / torturer sees shifts to the face:

Note the creases under the eyes and the clenched jaw;

the fully open mouth that mimics the shot in 1.2 when Porter is screaming at Collinson to give the order to turn back and pick up As’ad;

and the way that Armitage here almost fully conceals the pupils of eyes. Impressive.

By 0:45, what we see from the spectator’s perspective is no longer subjection, but the same defiance that Armitage has been showing to the unseen captor, in the resolute form of the interrogation passage:

This perspective established, the video then moves on to the break-free, which is established in a series of beautiful, dance-like moves.

Triumph.

Almost balletic.

Here the attack on the hook as the symbol of the implicit other begins; note that Armitage’s head is cut out of the frame and we see only the rotation of the torso and the hips.

And then the dizzying victory, as the chair is thrown at the hook and Porter is almost off-balance;

Followed by the step back to regain equilibrium.

and then this classy, defiant exit from the screen that the break-free suggests it cost Porter no effort at all:

He almost dancess off the screen.

The compression of the format virtually requires that Armitage be the only actor in the video, and also that nothing be undertaken that requires a great deal of explanation. Captivity and torture can only be implied, not actually visualized here. But the ending of the video, after so much effort, so much roaring like a lion, so much visceral work, with an almost casual marching off the screen makes us ask again: who is the implied other? Who is it that Porter is responding to? Who is he looking at in these final caps? And why can he leave the frame without any difficulty?

On the explicit level of the story to which it alludes, the video clearly makes the implicit other into a terrorist captor or torturer. But the ease with which Porter exits the frame seems in the end to suggest, with all its illusions to captivity that are then broken, that the implied other, the captor or torturer, may be Porter himself.  In the end, the camera reunifies the perspective of spectator and implied other / capturer / torturer to provide a picture of a single, resolute individual who is capable of breaking free — thus erasing the implied other entirely and leaving only the spectator perspective.  Just as his dreams in 1.3 are of captivity (jail) vs. freedom (sex), this video sequence thus suggests that the most important captor that Porter has to defeat may be: himself.

III. The Beauty of Armitage

On a separate point, Mr. Armitage or someone else (cameraman, director, editor?) is throughout drawing the absolute maximum aesthetic benefit from his marked facial physiognomy here — whoever filmed him knew like no one since the North & South people how to light the nose and exploit the profile to their advantage, either to throw one side of the face into shadow, as here:

or to indicate emotion: see here how the nose pulls down in a reflex to show disgust with the water Porter’s been doused with:

See here how the nose almost seems to be withdrawing into the face, Porter’s so angry:

or here, where the brow and nose are so extremely scrunched down that the nose works like a violent slash across Porter’s face:

In the end, plot and characterization notwithstanding, you can’t take your eyes off his face as he does so many intriguing things with it.

Was I hooked? By the end: definitely.

~ by Servetus on July 23, 2010.