The Armitage morass, or: why Servetus can’t get out (and you can’t, either)

I said I would plug this blog and I am happy to do so, not least because I feel like engaging with judiang is going to help me keep on track with some of my blogging goals. Before you do anything else, go over there and look at what she’s already written! Reading her today inspired me to revise and publish this building block post, in light of recent developments, after dithering about it for months. Part I is more about me and my reaction to stuff that’s been said here and elsewhere since the first week of January; part II is more about Armitage. Feel free to skip to part II; no offense taken.

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I.

Mr. Thornton (Richard Armitage) castigates Mr. Slickson (David Crellin) for manipulating his workers to the detriment of all the Milton manufacturers in North & South, episode 2. My cap.

One reason for this blog when I started it last Spring was to figure out what it is that’s so magnetic about Richard Armitage that I couldn’t wrest myself away from him — it was to be a means of figuring out what it is I’m supposed to be learning from him. As readership has grown, an increasing struggle has become involved — for one, with my qualms about how much I can reveal about my real life given my career situation. It’s been suggested by readers that I’m endangering myself and harming people to whom I have obligations. That’s the issue that’s hardest to deal with it because it actually relates to outcomes that seem plausible. I’m not harming anyone I know or to whom I am obligated by doing this, but the question of how writing this blog will affect my own life remains open. It’s hard to be open about the long list of stuff that’s bugging me and explaining the etiology of the current crisis in an honest way that demonstrates why Armitagemania has entered my life has turned out to be more difficult than even I anticipated. An equally serious problem has been occasional strong sentiment expressed by readers either on or off the blog that it’s not appropriate or ethical to write honestly and openly about what Mr. Armitage means to me or the role he plays in my life because it’s not fair to him, or because my interpretations constitute projections of my issues onto him. Although it’s hard for me to believe that the potential negative consequences to Mr. Armitage created by the contents of this blog in past and future are really much worse than incomprehension, astonishment, or embarrassment (a problem that, insofar as he is aware of anything individual fans like me write about him, rests with him to deal with in that ultimately how he feels about anything is his own affair), quite obviously I don’t wish to do him harm.

John Porter (Richard Armitage) stops to remember fallen comrades in front of the regimental memorial in Strike Back 1.1, presumably reproaching himself for his failure to protect them. Source: Richard Armitage Net

Guilt (even in its misplaced version) is a big motivator for me. But not a positive one, ever, even when I should feel guilty — and misplaced guilt’s one that’s been overused in my life and so thankfully seems to have less and less effect. Even so, concern over these problems, along with the desire to be liked and attract readers, has frequently led to me retreat into analysis or saying less than I might. With this post I’m not saying that I’m abandoning analysis of his work — I’m emphatically not, because the issue of how he achieves his effects is part of the draw for me, and whether I like it or not, detailed analysis is part of whom I’ve become in the last two decades. Just in seeking out these caps, I found two things I’d like to comment on, and I’ve become the master at writing a thousand words about fifteen seconds of film. So be it; it’s who I am right now. (On the other side: If this blog constitutes intellectual wankery to you, by which I assume one means writing about trivial things in unnecessarily ornate or complex terms that hide more than they reveal, or even worse, pseudo-intellectual wankery, by which I assume one means writing that masquerades as saying something meaningful when in fact it says nothing, don’t read it.)

I’m also not saying that I’m not still afraid of the consequences of such honesty — I know it will offend people, and some will express that sentiment with more venom than I really understand. Those people’s feelings are indeed their right and their privilege. I’ve never set out to create controversy, and I like to be liked as much as the next blogger, and to some extent I don’t understand the anger that surfaces toward me in my email, and in snide comments made elsewhere, and very, very occasionally, in comments here. But one of my chief problems in life has been an incapacity to take the kinds of creative risks that facilitate growth because I’m too afraid of damaging myself or people close to me. It’s one of the huge rhetorical problems with the professor job: say something controversial to differentiate yourself, but nothing too controversial, even if it’s what you think, because then you either can’t get yourself published or won’t be taken seriously. If this activity is to be successful in a way that my academic life has not, if it is not to disappoint me in the end in exactly the way the intellectual life of the university has, it is going to have to dare more. I am going to have to fear less. If the reaction of some readers to the blog is negative criticism of me, anyway, I’ve already lost them, so where’s the loss in saying what I really think to the people who indeed react positively, which is by far the majority?

So I’m giving myself notice that I am going to charge ahead again with more energy and less trepidation toward work on the actual project that led to the inception of this blog. Mr. Armitage: if you are ever reading this for some reason and you feel this blog harms you in a particular way you can specify, please have your agent contact me in some verifiable manner to explain, and I will take it private or stop entirely. I reiterate that this seems improbable to me. The apparent bigger problem is me, to whom I say: Servetus! Stop being such a coward. Sapere aude.

Gorgeous picture of an apparently enthusiastic Richard Armitage with Andrew Lincoln at the Strike Back premiere, April 15, 2010. Source: Richard Armitage Net

In the end, I developed this immoderate attachment to Mr. Armitage and his work because other things are wrong that will no longer let themselves be ignored. I grew up in a faith that teaches divine providence and I chose one for myself as an adult that has strains that stress similar themes. While intellectually I believe in the possibility of coincidence, on a gut level I do not, and the most successful therapy I’ve had stresses the significance of understanding events by association of meaning (as opposed to solely by causality). My life has never ceased to involve an ongoing search for meaning. Hence my most inner convictions suggest to me that all of this is not coincidence, and that this attachment has developed for specific reasons. That attachment is clearly non-volitional. I did not choose it, would not have chosen it — indeed, there’s a different sort of commitment that stands in the background of my life that I would choose a much more non-volitional attitude toward if I could. Armitagemania stands outside my previous life experience, and I’m still not sure I would choose it again. [In a scholarly article there’d be a long footnote to the mystics here, except I’m not sure whether I’m the mystic or whether Armitage is.]

At the same time, however, in the end, if my feelings were and remain unexpected, this act of blogging is volitional. No one forces me to write here, and soon I’ll be done with being forced to write elsewhere or indeed at all. I am blogging because I want to use it as a tool to help change my life, not least because of the flow experience it provides. It’s been suggested to me that I should be suspicious of flow from blogging, but I wonder why I should be suspicious about any kind of flow that harms no one and helps, at the very least, me! Why should I blog if I have to be afraid here in exactly the same way I was afraid every day in my office for eleven years? In the end, it is impossible to take any kind of action without affecting others. In the end, all interpretations involve assumptions and misassumptions, understandings and misunderstandings, of both myself and others. In the end, all I can do is articulate honestly my reasons for the conclusions I come to and try to see what they mean, and hope that I can express myself so as to be understood in productive ways. Armitagemania may involve an experience of intoxication (though that’s not all it is), but blogging is an active attempt to harness that energy for flow. I was excluded from flow for years here — indeed, let it happen to me, participated in surrendering it myself for reasons that were always proclaimed good and rational and sensible — until I lost the confidence that I could create anything of value at all. No matter how tenuous my hold on that now, I am not giving it up: not until I know more about why this is happening and how to make it keep on happening. It takes too much energy to keep building a wall against potential misunderstandings that I cannot control anyway. (Where have we heard this theme before recently, albeit it in more humorous terms, Armitage fans?). Basta ya. I’ve done apologizing.

Roger Hodgson sings “The Logical Song,” a world-wide hit for Supertramp in 1979. I reject the strong distinction between childhood and adulthood, but the general problem he outlines here has always resonated with me.

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II.

As a first move towards confronting the fears that lie at the root of the discussion above, and as a first notice of my rejection of ongoing attempts to limit discussion by the dubious means of coercive moral suasion, as an insight or a justification of sorts, is a desire to talk about something I’ve been turning over in my mind in various ways since June, trying to come up with an algorithm, a series of causal relationships that explain how something happens. But lately I’ve realized that’s not the way to explain it — understanding Armitage’s effect is not related to causality, but rather to synchronicity. Which elements are associated together by meaning?

My conclusions about these associations I will express in a relationship I call the Armitage morass. I’m aware that in common parlance that word has a negative connotation — something one can’t escape from, like a bog — and sometimes I think of it that way, when I can’t get him out of my head. At the same time, the word also has a usage in set theory, the field of knowledge that concentrates on how we can know which things (in this case, numbers) belong together — a fundamental human cognitive activity that’s taught beginning in primary school in the United States. [I beg your tolerance here as a historian trying to speak simultaneously in the languages of philosophy and mathematics. I may not always succeed. Your careful observations on the distinctions I draw are welcome and encouraged.]

“Which of these things is not like the others?” or: Set theory for preschoolers

In set theory, the morass refers to an infinite combinatorial structure (a structure for creating infinite potential combinations in sets that are finite but may be non-measurable) that is used to make large structures from a smaller, identifiable number of approximations. That’s the positive sense of the word that enlivens me on better days. As far as I understand it, and I may be bowdlerizing here, but I like this metaphorical usage, it’s a way of creating something sophisticated, or understanding the creation of something that may be sophisticated in a way that defies attempts to measure it, from a limited number of elements. For the Armitage morass — the structure that generates the set of all the outcomes that Mr. Armitage has created and ever will create for us as spectators — I’ve identified four approximations: (1) identity; (2) acting proficiency; (3) embodiment; and (4) choices of role. These elements are approximations because it is not entirely possible to define them exactly (what constitutes identity, for example). They are also still quite rough, but I’m going to continue to work on refining them.

Richard Armitage as Guy of Gisborne in a publicity photo for series 3 of Robin Hood. Source: Richard Armitage Net. Does anyone seriously think Armitage could have been Guy without his body or his personality? So why do we persist in separating these out?

1. Identity: the element that makes Mr. Armitage who he is and not someone else, that distinguishes him from the other people we know and makes him recognizable as Armitage. It incorporates inter alia history, experiences, the effects of perceptions of others, social embeddedness, the effects of culture, environment, and genetic background, as well as personality, volition, physicality, “the self,” imagination, etc. Oversimplified, perhaps, as “Richard Armitage the person.”

2. Acting proficiency: Mr. Armitage’s capacity to exercise his vocation with a particular degree of skill. Acting proficiency includes “talent” or “natural gifts” but also learned and practiced skills which are deployed intentionally or unconsciously to achieve an effect in a performance.

3. Embodiment: this means not only “looks” or physical appearance, but also all of the other the properties of the fact that he inhabits a particular body with certain features that facilitate certain effects on us because we also have identities, embodiments, and a situatedness. This element cannot be omitted because Mr. Armitage cannot act without his body (even in audio work). Not only is it part of his identity, it is the only means he has for manifesting himself to us. Without his body, we would not be able to perceive his skill or indeed even be aware of him.

4. Roles taken: these are the guises in which Armitage appears to us when fulfilling his vocation, including not only his dramatic roles, but also his public persona — the role of being Richard Armitage in public for the benefit of publicity, fans, etc. One assumes that these are largely voluntary stances, although the extent of that varies (perhaps he took some roles more willingly than others, or that his attitudes toward some roles changed or will change over time).

One of the first signs that John Bateman does not share the ethics of Lucas North: Lucas / John looks in resentment at Harry at the end of Spooks 9.2. Source: Richard Armitage Net. As I will argue below, Armitage’s performances combine inseparably and with particular technique and subtlety the role(s) — two — that Armitage plays here, his appearance, his acting, and the elements and experiences of self that he puts into the roles.

It is useful, indeed necessary, to think of these pieces in a morass called Richard Armitage because together the approximations, though themselves relatively small in number, give us the raw materials necessary for such varied roles as John Standring and Guy of Gisborne and John Porter and so on. Neither are they fully separable. In the end, when we see Lucas North, we cannot fully fathom what is going on without thinking about Armitage’s choice to appear to us in this guise (his casting as Lucas and acceptance of the role), the way in which Lucas looks and moves when Armitage plays him (embodiment), Armitage’s ability to convince us that he is Lucas (acting), and all of the pieces of himself that Mr. Armitage puts into the role (both experiential and imagined).

Armitage is thus more than his body, or his personality, or his skills, or his professional choices — but he is never, ever less than these as seen through the structure of their combinations, either — which, due to our lack of perfect information, we may not always glimpse clearly, but which it is the task of more and more precise analysis to cast light upon. It is thus equally a fallacy to reduce the complexity of Lucas to how Mr. Armitage looks, as it is to say that how he looks plays no part in the effect that Lucas has on us as spectators. Similarly, it is equally false to assert that Armitage’s personal attitudes toward playing attractive (sexy) characters have no influence on how he plays an obviously sexy character like Lucas, as it is to assert that all that Armitage does in the Lucas role is stand before the camera and appear sexy. It is equally incorrect to claim that Mr. Armitage’s career comes only from his choice of roles as it is to claim that his career has had no relationship to them, equally missing the point to say that Lucas is only the script, as that Lucas is only Armitage’s creation and has nothing to do with the script at all. And so on.

Rosie (Keely Hawes) and Harry Kennedy (Richard Armitage) skirt an actual morass in “The Handsome Stranger,” the first Vicar of Dibley Christmas episode in which he starred. Source: Richard Armitage Central Gallery. Geraldine is hiding in the morass. Make of that what you will; I certainly thought about it myself.

Servetus thus embraces the task of understanding Richard Armitage as a morass which requires a balanced consideration of multiple elements insofar as we can obtain information about them, without the arbitrary exclusion of any of them. The utility of this concept derives from its notion that a sophisticated structure of combination (a constructible universe, in the language of set theory) cannot be talked about in the absence of any of its necessary elements — or as if any of those elements were abstractable from the others, or must be suppressed. I’ve read some indication that it’s not acceptable or ethical to talk about Armitage’s body, only his acting, because talk about his appearance = objectification. But if ethics demand truth, then it is ethically necessary to speak of the combination of all of these things with as much honesty as possible — not edit them out because we find some of them emotionally distasteful or politically inconvenient. To pretend that there is no person behind any of these roles because we are uncomfortable about the conclusions that our fellow fans might draw about how we interpret the available information about that person — because we are afraid the person might be damaged by others’ misinterpretation of our stated perceptions — is as obfuscating as it is to reduce the effect of Armitage’s roles to his (apparent) identity (or what we know about it). Indeed, to speak about Armitage’s performances as if they were the result of one of these elements exclusively rather than the others thus denies the elements’ relationship of meaning to each other as integral parts of a whole. To say that some of these parts play no meaningful role in affecting others darkens, rather than elucidates, our understanding of what is going on in Armitage and in our fascination with him. It goes without saying that everyone must be responsible in what she says — but everyone’s notion of responsible speech is going to differ because every person as an interpreter differs. In the end, we need more readings of Armitage if we’re going to understand his work, not fewer — more voices that discuss greater numbers of approximations — not an intentional suppression of any aspects that make up the morass, miscast as an ethical stance in order to silence fellow fans and assuage our fears, whatever they are — and as if we had a right to act on our fears about Armitage as if they were naturally also his fears about himself. When we say, “it’s only about his acting, not about his appearance,” probably most of us are also lying about ourselves in our roles as interpreters — which is equally unethical as spreading alleged misinterpretations of Armitage, and, given the sort of information we have about ourselves, probably involves a lot more intentional effort.

This is not to say that any provisional interpretation is going to be perfect. Sometimes some of these things are quicksand: a transfixing photo, a complimentary statement about Armitage in the press, a fanfic, a vid, grabs our attention and focuses it on one element to the exclusion of the others. But one of the things that makes Armitage great is that he can’t ever be reduced to any of these things, that his combinatorial structure, the Armitage morass, transcends them. As soon as I think I’ve put my finger on one of them I find myself feeling that I’ve completely ignored another. If you’ve been reading the blog over the last year you’ll have noticed that I’ve been mired in various of these approximations at different times, with a long spell on embodiment in the summer, but also a long but interrupted discussion of identity there as well.

The role Servetus was prepared to hate. As John Porter (Richard Armitage) realizes that Hugh Collinson (Andrew Lincoln) has suffered under the lie he told back in Basra and will continue to do so, he forgives Collinson, in Strike Back 1.6. Source: Richard Armitage Net.

I’m pretty sure, though, in reflecting about this now, that Armitage grabbed me first because of the roles. This is the place that I started, with North & South, and ultimately come back to, the primary reason that I keep watching — because this choice of roles says something to me. Eventually I’ll say more about that, because it’s counter-intuitive from my personal perspective that I’d ever consider watching a show like Robin Hood, let alone Strike Back. But in trying to understand how those characters were put together I had to look closely at him, and of course the first thing I noticed was his embodiment. Thornton was devastatingly attractive. But that, in turn, was jarred by my perception of “Armitage the person” in the DVD interview, whom I did not find anywhere near as compelling as Thornton. It seemed like he had an entirely different body and personality. Which pushed me toward acting and trying to understand how the slightly giggly and nervous Armitage of that interview could so fully inhabit Thornton that I really thought they were entirely different people. Which made me wonder about who Armitage the person was and what personal qualities he must have that allowed him to do that. In the end, discovering what he said about himself, what people said about him, and some of the stuff he has done also just mired me further, and a bunch of the identity posts from last summer seem in retrospect like me trying to undermine that aspect of the morass in order to bring the whole thing tumbling down.

So it’s a complex structure and it’s a bog. He picks an amazing sequence of roles that he enhances through his fabulous acting which is accomplished through a transfixing body and anchored in an (apparent) personality type and ethics that I admire greatly. When, after a period of overfocus on a single element, I want to write him off as one of these things, I fall back in, attracted by one of the others. Right now, I can’t get out. And I wonder if that sort of inescapable combination is part of what draws other viewers to him, as well.

~ by Servetus on January 28, 2011.