Sheltering Armitage: or, Whence the protective impulses?

[12/29/10: ETA: JUST TO SHOW THE JOKE’S ON ME I WENT THROUGH AND COPYEDITED MYSELF THIS AFTERNOON. — SERVETUS]

This question’s been on my mind a lot every since I started reading Armitage’s press, in which he occasionally comments on the protectiveness of his fans, and now we finally have a concrete, new context in which to discuss it.

Lucas North (Richard Armitage) gazes down in open pain as Sarah Mitchell keens over the dead body of her son in Spooks 7.6. My cap. Armitage characters seem to take it on the chin for a disproportionate amount of the time, and their emotional reactions to the their fates are written on their faces. So much Armitage character fanfic involves the protective, caring impulses of Mary Sues. When we want to protect Armitage, are we responding to the vulnerabilities he gives his characters? Or to something about him?

The occasion: The “Christmas message.” That we all geek out over, though perhaps our geeking out itself is a little silly. That relieved both me and Frenz. That screams out for interpretation with its citations and its references to double negatives. That I didn’t want to interpret for fear of being taken seriously. pi, in a typically incisive and elegant post, reads that there is still some there, there, in Mr. Armitage’s words — that the relative innocent and the complex artist hasn’t haven’t been fully erased by his oh-so-smooth publicist, yet. (And I wonder: is this the last or penultimate year where this style of communication will be possible for him and us? What will happen after The Hobbit premieres?) As usual, and as her blog subtitle notes, the comment’s outside the box, which makes it particularly interesting. She also mimes mimics Mr. Armitage’s style, which is impressive.

Mrs. Thornton (Sinéad Cusack) straightens the tie and coat of her son (Richard Armitage) before he goes out to work for the day in episode 1 of North & South. Source: Richard Armitage Central Gallery. To what extent are Armitage fans channeling Mrs. Thornton, who believes the best of her son and gets aggressive when anyone hurts him?

But my question today relates to a conversation I’ve had a few times in the last few days, in which the pattern is that first no one says anything about the mechanics of Mr. Armitage’s message, and then someone admits that they she noticed some grammatical and mechanical errors in it, and then someone else admits that they have she has to hold back their her impulse to correct the errors, and then someone else says that the mistakes are sweet, and that of course his education concerned things other than the placement of apostrophes.

Having recently graded thousands of pages of undergraduate prose, and having whined about at least three of the errors Mr. Armitage made, I have my own opinions on this topic. One is that speaking and writing language are two different skills. Both require practice. One suspects Mr. Armitage gets more practice in one than in the other. A second is that the use of the apostrophe in English is sufficiently confusing to confound plenty of otherwise bright people, and it’s a frequent error in the student writing I read. (One almost wishes that we could follow the much less complicated rules for its employment in German, although Germans also experience difficulties with it nowadays, apparently.) A third is that my experience suggests that for whatever reason (I have no desire to discuss whether this phenomenon is biological or cultural or a combination of both, I merely observe it), on average, though there are certainly exceptions, the men in my classes display more difficulties with mastering the mechanical and grammatical conventions of written English than the women do. And, of course, grammar and mechanics are popularly attributed to the left brain, and despite the crudity of that dichotomy as it’s understood in the popular press (it doesn’t describe me very well, for instance), probably most of us read Mr. Armitage as a right brainer. Presumably texting will eventually do away with the apostrophe; since I’ve started doing it I’ve noticed a decreasing reliance on punctuation as that involves three extra button strokes to accomplish.

But my own reaction follows the pattern above. I notice the mistakes, I don’t say anything, I admit that they’re there, I want to correct them, and then I end by giving him a pass on the basis that he left formal academics at the age of seventeen. And on the basis that the errors are so inimitably his that I’d rather read this message from him than something with correct mechanics that had been supervised by a copy editor. If this is the one close-to-personal thing that we get from Mr. Armitage in a year, the errors are evidence of the closeness of the text to the speaker, and for that reason attractive, even indispensable.

But the pattern of the reaction bugs me. For me in particular: I’m an oldest child and a big sister who did watch out for her little brother, and I could be Mr. Armitage’s big sister (he’d fit precisely into the gap between me and my brother), so that reaction is pre-programmed. But he’s not my sibling, and many of the impulses I have when watching him are hardly familial. (Unless you consider the impulse to strip off your clothes and engage forthwith, tumultuously, in rather violent procreation, to be familial. Cough. A different kind of familial, I guess. Cough again.) But I do have the protective impulse myself. It shows up in my case when I see him badly dressed (see photo at right). And I wonder where it comes from. Do George Clooney’s fans want to protect him?

Are we Armitage fans peculiarly protective of our wish object? And if so, why? What is about Mr. Armitage that brings out the defender, the mother, the sister, in so many of us? Why will I forgive his writing errors when they’d be a turn-off in any man I met in real life?

~ by Servetus on December 28, 2010.