Mr. Armitage, his fans, our pursuit of “great art,” and me as critic, part 1

Photo: Richard Armitage with Annabel Capper at the 2006 Children’s BAFTAs award ceremony. Source: Richard Armitage Fan Blog. I’m posting this not as an entry in the perennially boring “who’s his partner?” sweepstakes, but because he looks as happy here as I’ve ever seen him in any photo, and that’s what I wish for him, no matter what else happens in his life and career: happiness. Really, it’s the least I could wish for the life of someone who’s — all unknowing — brought so much pleasure to mine.

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In the wake of the initial broadcast of Strike Back, a “quo vadis Mr. Armitage?” mood seemed to be emerging in the Armitage blogosphere and environs. You’re probably familiar with some of these comments: from mulubinba, for example, who reads the Armitage fandom as a potential broad church, although she’d prefer more period drama herself, and a slightly more critical one from pi (which is what finally got me out of my funk to finish writing about this, so thanks as usual, pi!). I think other statements dealt with this question, too, although I can’t find them now. Please use the comments to post a link if you wrote or commented on this theme elsewhere. The specter of “Go West, young man, go West!” and the potential Nat polled about of the desirability of him undertaking work in Hollywood –a topic mentioned in several of the Strike Back related interviews– was a component of this discussion; there are worries that some fans only want to watch Armitage playing British characters and from something I read recently it seems Armitage, too, worried about the possibility that pleasing his fans would lead to being typecast.

Reading the latter saddened me. An actor has plenty to worry about without being concerned about the loyalty of his fans. It’s not that I think fans have an obligation to be loyal any more than I think an actor has an obligation to do only things that he knows will please his fans. It’s that I’m sorry he feels or felt influenced in his choices to the extent that he would even ask himself that question. It’s that I think that the line between actor and audience has to be fairly robust; despite the desire on both sides to reach out in good will, good fences make good neighbors. On both sides we pay a price for the free experience of his artistry: as much as I may identify with what I know about him, I can’t ever have him as my friend, and even if he likes what well-disposed fans write, he can’t ever count on us treating him as if he were. The artist must remain free to make his own choices, free of duress, if he’s to grow in skill and spirit, just as the critical (in the sense of evaluative) audience needs to be able to respond in freedom to the artist’s choices or its response will not be truly critical. The risk, of course, is that not every aesthetic or professional choice one makes will be loved, or even understood; the freedom to succeed with something new is equally the freedom to fail at it. It would be creatively laming for any artist worth his salt to believe that the main reason he continued to get roles was because of the preferences of his core fans and not because of the quality of his performances. (For legitimate objections that an artist never performs in the absence of (at least a notional) audience, see section below on “getting work.”) In such a situation, anyone even slightly introspective would wonder about the quality of his performances in a spectrum outside fan love, or alternately, if he’d have to force himself to channel his artistic growth into channels that his fans already approved to keep working. If he’s who he seems to be in interviews, I’m sure Armitage doesn’t want us praising his new work on the basis of his earlier performances or because many of us have grown to like him based on what we think we’ve learned about him personally. The artist who wants to improve has to sort through the criticism he gets, consider the source, and incorporate what’s accurate and helpful into his performances — or not. If he doesn’t go through the process of sifting genuine and relevant responses to his work, he will lose the capacity to surprise us or enchant us with his skills in new ways. The price of artistic freedom is inherent insecurity — a mood that drives one on to try to get better and better. But the necessary preconditions for Armitage’s artistic growth — especially the freedom to take risks that may not always provoke universal applause — also neutralize his right to hurt feelings about our reactions to his work. If he is going to please and satisfy himself as an actor, he has to focus on matters beyond pleasing and satisfying us. He’s absolutely right that as an actor, he can’t also be a “hopeless people-pleaser” to his fans.

Now, I’m not worried about staleness with Armitage at the moment: I am regularly so surprised by his work that I have to watch or listen to it repeatedly to make sure I’ve gotten everything that’s there. I’m just stating that appreciation circumscribed by mutual autonomy is the only real basis for the actor / fan relationship. Fans did a lot for Mr. Armitage at the beginning of his career, via a spontaneous burst of enthusiasm for a job well done, and then by giving him an internet presence that initially well dwarfed the significance of his career and certainly enhanced awareness of his work more quickly than it might have spread otherwise. And he’s expressed his sincere appreciation for fan support many times in ways that suggest that he understands the role that fans played in setting him on a particular professional trajectory. But you know what? He’s said at least once that he sees the turning point in his career as Sparkhouse, because it marked a new approach for him in pursuing a role. Even more: fans didn’t get him the role we probably see as the turning point: Mr. Thornton. He did that all by himself. He said once in an interview that he thought having a following helped, but even at that point it didn’t get him everything he wanted –films, for example– and he talked about the role, not the fans, putting him on the map. Presumably he still had to audition for roles afterward and he still may. So gratitude for fan support should not and cannot mean extending power over his creative choices to fans — even those who might think they know better than he does what he’s doing — and that includes me. If he can’t act freely, then I have no chance of evaluating his acting freely. Of course I have preferences. I have a right to my opinion, but that’s all it can ever be in his life: my opinion. None of us have any right in the universe to any hurt feelings at all about any of his choices.

John Porter (Richard Armitage) indicates on a map where Sister Bernadette should go in order to cross the border to South Africa in Strike Back 1.4. My cap. Can’t resist pointing out that this is a nice thumb shot. They turn up everywhere once you start looking.

Still, constant questions about his fans in interviews (and our responses to his answers — did anyone like being called motherly or protective? Thankfully he stopped saying that by the time of the Spooks 9 publicity) point out that we stand in an atypical relationship to him, one engendered not least by Mr. Armitage’s unusual awareness of and generosity to his fans after the broadcast of North & South. So it’s not surprising that many of us might feel a reciprocal obligation, one that hems our willingness to respond with complete candor to his career choices. I’ve had at least a half-dozen conversations off blog about Strike Back in which the consensus was simultaneously “he is so much better than that lousy script” and “I’m not sure it’s fair / kind to say that.” RAFrenzy expressed comparable reservations about the scripting of Lucas North’s entire character arc on Spooks yesterday (I haven’t had time to read this very closely, but the discussion is interesting. I think I disagree with her, but I’ll have to put that off as I want to finish writing this post!). I feel some of that myself, insofar as I thought after reading the Sunday Express interview that his statements about the lack of attractive drama scripts might have applied indirectly to his own perceived capacity to choose projects he really liked. I concluded privately that perhaps it’s not fair to criticize because John Porter might not have been his first choice of roles. However he felt about it, though, — and the full cut of the first Donald Stephenson interview, I believe, mentioned that his first reaction to the project was negative — he didn’t stray from the course once he had chosen it. He did a great job of selling Strike Back as potential art, full of ethical conflict (of this, more below, in the section on what constitutes art), but — as he noted himself — it was something that the audience that discovered him in North & South was not automatically inclined to like. It wasn’t that we couldn’t be moved there, as RAFrenzy noted several times (once here). She said something smart that I can’t put my mouse on but that’s been ringing in my ears about how Mr. Armitage understood that the audiences that would come along with him from his previous projects needed Strike Back to be more than an action flick. I do think his remarks about Strike Back suggest that he was making a good faith effort to explain to us how a project so out of the average North & South fan’s comfort zone fit into his own professional and artistic trajectory. That was considerate of him. But even so, he shouldn’t have to plead for our understanding. Conversely, if those of us who write or comment about him feel strongly that the roles he’s taking are problematic, we should feel no bounds beyond those of common courtesy on stating exactly that. I don’t mean to delegitimate his marketing effort for Strike Back, which made sense to me and which I think played well, despite a definition of “atonement” that was rather loosy-goosey for anyone who knows much about the theological meaning of that word, and a resulting rhetorical confusion about who exactly was atoning for what, as Ann Marie noted. I simply want to reiterate that given my understanding of the artist – fan relationship as sketched above, both sides have to feel autonomous in terms of their judgments.

But to come back to the beginning of this past, which pondered the recent emergence of this question: why now? It wasn’t because Strike Back was universally disliked; on the contrary, my reading of the response to it in Armitageworld was that the many luscious views of Mr. Armitage’s body nearly made up in the eyes of many readers for any failings in the script. There was the nagging problem of feelings of manipulation, of the show’s appeal to base instinct, and I wrestled with this myself. (Of this, also more below in the section on “beauty”). As this discussion of his career path emerged, it wasn’t immediately apparent what his next project after Spooks 9 might be, so there was opportunity for a lot of speculative chatter. Certainly, his career appears to be at a crossroads, as the sequence of roles in Robin Hood, Spooks, and Strike Back suggests that he’s hit a summit in terms of the number of screens he can control simultaneously on UK television at any one time. (One interviewer made a nice joke about this, suggesting that Armitage could hold the BBC primetime lineup for ransom. Armitage responded in quite vivid terms that this responsibility would be too much pressure.)

My own guess, though, is that the discussion is emerging now in this particular form because, although he must have been making choices all along about what to audition for, and maybe very recently about which roles to accept that he was offered without having to audition, this is one of the first moments in his career where we can see that he must be having to choose between different projects. As a consequence, we now have the freedom to disagree with his choices as opposed to parroting a central dogma of Armitageworld, to wit: we just want him to keep working, to be able to see him in anything. Because Strike Back was renewed for 10 more episodes, it is common consensus, his commitment to that will limit the amount of time that Mr. Armitage can devote to stuff that many of us already know we like better — Spooks 10, if Lucas North doesn’t get killed, maimed, or fired during the current series — or think we would — like “The Rover,” which would be a satisfying move back in the direction of North & South and of his RSC roots. As we puzzle over the extent of his freedom to make choices at this particular moment (one assumes that he was contracted to continue in SB if it was renewed), week after week, voicework appeared –an audiobook, a radio broadcast, auto, sports, and jewelry advertisements, documentary voiceovers– all of which seemed to suggest that rather than planning to surprise us with a new production in the genre of high art, Armitage might be working around the clock at a number of things that look suspiciously like piecework. And there’s no break for him on the horizon. Anyone who was already skeptical about Strike Back because of its doubtful artistic merit is potentially even more bothered by the information that gradually trickled out about Mr. Armitage’s role as the German villain Heinz Krüger in the upcoming Captain America film. It’s not that he’s abandoned art: this year we heard Clarissa and Symphony of a City, and he was great in both. But they were not screen or stage productions. His Spotlight showreel (which doesn’t include any work completed after Robin Hood 3) still ends with the proposal scene in North & South, but it begins with a(n attractively crafted) sequence that manages to make even Mr. Thornton look edgy and seems to set him up as an action specialist. His continual repetition of the refrain of his interest in selling a retelling of the Richard III story notwithstanding, it is not entirely unreasonable to conclude that Richard Armitage is starting to look like someone who wants to do action roles and projects that fall under the rubric of “entertainment,” instead of the actor that the fans who used their computers to catapult him to public attention in 2004 thought he was: a dramatic artist with the potential to become the next great interpreter of Shakespeare — or at the very least, an ongoing competitor worthy of Colin Firth for favorite period drama lead.

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A map (hidden under a VHS cassette) is one of the objects that give clues to Lucas North / John’s mysterious past in Spooks 9.2. My cap.

As a good academic writer, I always trace what others think and then comment on it critically before presenting my own stance, which is generally much harder to pinpoint. Now I have to write what I think about all of this from my situation as interpreter of what I know of Mr. Armitage’s career. On a simple level, should I admit to reservations about Strike Back? Or about any other project? If so, on what basis? Can I sign on to any reservations about the direction his career is taking? And if so, should I express them? And what about (I write, trying to avoid raising my left hand to my face in imitation of Lucas North’s “extreme emotional distress” signal) his acting itself?

I joked recently that the love language of Servetus is “close analysis.” The more I love something, the more closely I’ll look at it, and the more I’ll write. Thinking via synecdoche has been my pattern since I was a child: what does the detail tell us about the whole? (I’ll also keep wearing an awful piece of clothing just because it has a detail that I really love.) Moreover, for reasons closely connected to my personal issues for writing it, and because of the mechanisms by means of which Armitage has influenced me most deeply, a great deal of the analysis concerning him presented on this blog has been about “how.” How an effect is established, how Mr. Armitage performs, how a scene is put together, how a costume fits, how his eyes or his body move. There’s a component of “why” there as well: why I find a still picture or a scene compelling, for example. I write about myself in terms of “what” and “whither,” and I’ve commented on things like how we can know “who he is” and my own identification with Mr. Armitage that get to content issues, but even these posts have mostly been constructed as analyses of rhetoric rather than evaluations of anything I assert to be real. I’ve been reluctant to make normative recommendations on larger issues, beyond things like what he should be looking for in a suit. That doesn’t mean I haven’t; aside from the discussion about what he should say about his fans, I speculated that he might have good reasons for taking ad work; I expressed no regret about his detachment from the Charlie project, and I’ve said in a few places that I assume that the primary purpose of Captain America is networking as opposed to artistic merit or professional trajectory. Except occasionally, “me + richard armitage” hasn’t been about the really big questions, and I envy writers who can easily take on that kind of question. (It’s an issue that’s bedeviled me as an academic writer, too.)

So I think that readers of this blog would have a case for claiming that –despite all the analytical detail– I’ve abandoned the viewpoint of objective observer, since I have never written anything strongly negative about Mr. Armitage except, perhaps, as regards his clothing choices, and have never been more than mildly negative about moments in his work that I don’t care for, and even that I do very rarely. Believe it or not, though, I actually do have some negative evaluations of moments in his work! Now, I don’t have anywhere near the time to write or develop every thought I have. I have notes and notes and notes of stuff to write here — and on any given day I pick the theme that fits my mood or the time I have available. So readers shouldn’t discount the possibility that more negative criticism might eventually appear. Admittedly I am usually writing to cheer myself up, reassure myself, or vent, and fingerpointing at Armitage’s flaws as an actor has never fit into those needs especially well.

Photo: Servetus — really just a propagandist for Richard Armitage

As an explanation for why I haven’t yet written much like that, though, more important is my feeling that all evaluation occurs in a particular context; this is an insight that follows upon so many years spent teaching. I taught for my first time in a Sunday School class as a newly-confirmed fourteen-year-old, and so I have been thinking about how to reach learners for 2/3 of my life. Now, I am not trying to teach Mr. Armitage anything. But the pattern of “first praise, then blame,” the mantra of successful grading, has ground its way deep into my synapses. My awareness of this state of mind suggests to me that I will be more likely to offer negative comments about any of his work as moments of a longer analysis — when I am noticing them as part of a particular question I’ve asked — than as a separate theme. Errors (apart from moral ones) are always errors in context; what is right in one place can be wrong in another. Seek to understand before you judge — one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in the classroom. I’m not ready to pardon everything I understand, even as a teacher, but I do find that it trying to understand enriches my appreciation of my students’ work. That may not be the most helpful approach for writing succinct blog posts, but that is who I am: as writer, teacher, and critic. So the final question is the easiest to answer: would I criticize his acting? Yes. If I felt it were warranted. In context. After I had sought to understood what he was doing on the basis of what I could grasp were his own terms.

The other four questions are the same question, and the answer(s) are a bit more complex. So that I can be understood, if not pardoned, I’ll first offer the answer, and then reasons why I give it. Though I can’t guarantee how I’ll feel in six months, I am pretty sure at this point — unless Mr. Armitage starts making sn*ff, or something else that I find morally objectionable (that is, beyond “just” troubling)– that he’s not going to to be likely to get criticism from me on the basis of either genre or the scripts of the work he takes. (I consider a test case for this assertion below.) Now, I have and will continue to point out script problems, but I am going to be more interested in how effectively he deals with them in his performances than I will in arguing that a weak script was a reason not to take a role. I reiterate the position I sketched above: I read with interest the arguments of those who make such arguments, I think I understand where they are coming from, and in line with my notion of their actor / fan relationship, I not only support their right to make them, I can think of good reasons why they might be helpful to Mr. Armitage’s self-understanding as an actor. Not only that: I suspect that many readers of this blog are more likely to agree with those kinds of critiques than with the position I explain below. It seems inevitable that if Mr. Armitage continues making TV drama and action pieces rather than projects that are considered more “artistically significant” following conventional judgments, that the number of people making them (particularly among that initial group of fans and/or among those who came to Armitage fandom via North & South) will increase rather than decrease. In line with my comments above: whether to respond or react to that sentiment is his problem — though in my opinion, not his obligation. In the next post, however, I will make the opposite case, which underlines some important analytical principles for understanding the judgments I articulate on this blog.

[Sorry — don’t mean to leave you in medias res — this just got way too long for words.]

~ by Servetus on October 7, 2010.