The problem, Mr. Armitage …

… of which you are no doubt yourself increasingly well aware, is that no matter how impressed we are by your acting, and I, for one, am really impressed by that, we also can’t stop looking at you. These perceptions are not unconnected. When you are “there,” you seem to be intensely present, and even when you’re not fully there, there’s a presence in the background. This is a bit of a riff, or an attempt to distill a particular feature of what Skully was saying about the way you create desire. But the general mood goes beyond desire, as well.

Richard Armitage appears on the cooking segment of Lorraine, ITV, September 17, 2010. Clip here. My cap.

At least from my perspective, the reason I can’t stop looking is not necessarily because you are all that great looking in a conventional way. You’re not by any means ugly, but too much of how your face is put together slides far enough outside the norms of male attractiveness. I admit that there are some great still photographs of you, but it’s not about your features — it’s about your energy, and usually the most entrancing piece of that is reflected in your eyes. Is that heresy?

I can totally see how you might disappear into a crowd if you were on a subway, immersed in your newspaper, and not speaking, whether you had a hat on or not. The effect is more like this: it’s that you have a sort of magnetic energy that is almost a humming when you’re present for just a little bit, speaking about whatever. You don’t have to say anything drastic; you don’t have to say much of anything at all. And then, in the course of some inane conversation, that humming suddenly comes alive and it’s shocking. This is why, although it’s frustrating to watch you with idiot interviewers, in the end it doesn’t matter, because in the end we forget about your interlocutor — you practically wipe these innocent women off the screen. It’s like a piece of this simmering charisma in the background suddenly shoots to your face, and I forget everything else, and I can’t look away. (This actually must be a relatively big problem for you to deal with when acting against someone who doesn’t have that presence. I’ve thought this a few times while watching you recently.) And even occasionally, as in early interviews, where for whatever reason that energy doesn’t get out, we still notice it, simmering away, quietly but insistently.

Richard Armitage with Myleene Klass, Lorraine, September 17, 2010. My cap.

Looking to see that — to experience that sudden infusion of presence — is what keeps me turning my screen on to watch you again. I’m reading an unusual number of sources from the early modern western Christian mystic tradition with my students in both classes this semester, and though I am not a natural mystic, my reading of these texts is helping me to understand the effect you’re having on me. The mystic practitioner spends most of her time in a state of preparation, waiting for something divine to become immanent and trying to set up the conditions for that contact to come to pass, to prepare themselves to experience union with the divine. Mystics usually indeed spend most of their time without the presence of G-d, longing for it. But once they’ve experienced it, they can’t stop.

Yes, I know that I have a weird predilection for religious metaphor, so I want to assure you and readers of this blog that I’m not confusing you with G-d, but this way that you have of suddenly piercing right through all the cloudiness, to the heart of something, is so weirdly penetrative on a personal level, so frighteningly intense, that I want to see and experience it again and again. And unlike the mystic searching for G-d, I can simply turn on some of video of you and experience it over and over again. I don’t ever have to long for it and go unfulfilled. I can give myself a hit as often as I need to. But it’s not quite like a drug. It’s more like a compulsion. I keep having to remind my students that in the later sixteenth century the verb “fascinate” largely carried a negative meaning: to be enchanted by witchcraft, by a force outside one’s own volition. Though I don’t completely perceive it as negative, I do experience it as something slightly beyond my control. After all these months, I remain weirdly entranced by you. Stirred, if you will. If I must.

And I don’t think my perception of this effect is limited to it being a function of your acting, though that is potentially the point at which you are perhaps consciously exploiting it; it’s apparent in these televised interviews, too, just in a different way. There’s something about you, an odd electric quality that you can apparently channel into acting but that’s hardly absent even when you’re being interviewed. You have a right to be confused about this, since many of your female fans are. I, too, occasionally descend into reveries about your physical attraction. So I can forgive that you are missing the point in terms of your own perception of what it is you actually do on screen if you think that people — women — are going to stop dropping their jaws over your performances if you just put on the beard of a dwarf or take on “ugly” roles. For better or for worse, you’re going to have to do a great deal more than uglify yourself if you want to keep people from staring at you. You’re going to have to somehow blunt or deaden this effect. (Or turn it off, or lose yourself in a protective cloud, or retreat from it to recuperate, as I wonder if you must do in your real life.) Because aging, cosmetic or natural, isn’t going to change that. It’s a consequence of personality, of some capacity, however occasionally or unintentionally you are in touch with it yourself, or motivate it for us, of some feature of how you are, of your being in the world.

~ by Servetus on October 27, 2010.