I’ve been seen through

This was Lina’s comment, which impressed / shocked me so much:

Interesting to me how much the themes here have in common with issues of being a fangirl … the easy one is probably the idea of holding someone up as the object of your desire (and in a blogosphere public kind of way) without his consent and without allowing him any sort of control over the situation.

But also, I think there’s the side of experiencing desire for someone held up (in general and especially in the RA blogging universe) as “almost too good to be true” (Talented! Gorgeous! Modest! Kind! He even learns freaking Maori for goodness sake…) and knowing our own human failings all too well. Part of being a fangirl is pushing at the interplay between the desirable and the unattainable. It almost seems like the literal bonds are your mind’s way of working out the “out of our league” issue–they’re what tether the fantasy JP to the fantasy Servetus–and in your stories when he’s free to go he doesn’t stay.

Classic theme if you look at it that way–seems to me to have lots more in common with Pluto and Persephone (pomegranate = rope) or Beauty and the Beast (magic = rope) than the Marquis de Sade…

Interesting to me, at any rate–YMMV.

Indeed. All along, I’ve been feeling like these images of Porter took me captive, and that that’s a function of my ambivalence about fangirling — the images took me captive last summer, but the actor had taken me captive long before. Blogging has been an attempt to understand what took and kept me prisoner, and in that sense, any kind of fantasy expressed out loud or in words is a performance of my puzzlement at (still) being captive — but I’ve carried on without any real belief that I would thereby be released. Porter in particular, I noticed last summer, seemed like a metaphorical symbol of my own captivity to Armitage and/or Armitagemania. So writing about a fantasy in which I tease John Porter sexually or humiliate him or hold him captive is in some ways also a revenge fantasy. You won’t let go of me? Well, then just see what I’ll do to you — at least in my mind. Not asking the subject of the blog to consent mirrors my own frequent feelings of non-consent about writing it. Though I think it’s clear from the dark tone of these stories that I also feel no little guilt about this relationship.

John Porter (Richard Armitage), bound to get him to admit that he’s an MI-6 operative, in Strike Back 1.6. An image I haven’t been able to bring myself to talk about yet. Source: Richard Armitage Net

Don’t get me wrong. All in all, blogging Armitage has been beyond good, as I expressed in my anniversary post; it’s been a lifesaver and I think it’s also been beneficial to me in other ways that I haven’t had time to write about yet — in ways that people in my real life who know about this blog often mention to me. To feel compelled to write is always, always better than feeling compelled to silence, a much more frequent experience of mine in the last few years. To be fair, it’s also absolutely correct that the “too good to be true” factor plays a role in capacitating and sustaining this feeling of captivity, but since I’d been writing a post on that topic — “Richard Armitage and the Fantasy of the Virtuous Man” — after the video with the powhiri footage that I still want to finish, I’m going to bracket that out for right now. Because of that this post may eventually end up reading as more conflicted than I really feel about blogging and Armitage and his roles at the moment.

Martin Freeman and the cast of The Hobbit, with Richard Armitage in the far back of the photo, second from right. The virtuous, modest man hangs back — and by withdrawing, attracts our gaze yet again. Source: Richard Armitage Net

Nonetheless, on the captivity theme, there’s a further sense in which I feel captured by these pictures — that is, in the sense in which I feel like my ability to speak about this topic as I might is strongly limited. Now, I’m sure there are readers who regularly feel that I am saying too much, and that some, perhaps many, things I do write would be better left unsaid. I’ve been told that directly on a few occasions. But while I can say relatively freely how I feel about or react to John Porter, the situation with regard to Mr. Armitage is much more constrained. The role / actor distinction, for example, is hugely problematic, and I wonder frequently how much my deployment of it as an analytical tool is really simply a not-very-opaque attempt at saving face. This blog ends up being my one excess, but the notion that it’s honest may be my own crowning delusion.

Because yeah, there’s a whole list of things I can’t say about myself in regard to Richard Armitage. They make me look crazy, and I don’t want to admit them to either myself or anyone else, least of all Mr. Armitage. Or even admitting that in some alternate universe I would want these things to happen is somehow damaging to Mr. Armitage. (I struggle with this a fair amount, as I do think there are fan behaviors that are not only damaging to him, but — more troublingly — also counter-productive in that they’re scary.) But I don’t think writing in this way quite gets there. So here are some things that I may not be allowed to say about myself in regard to him.

Armitage bound again, this time in the guise of Lucas North at the hands of an attacker in Spooks 9.5. Source: Richard Armitage Net

Mr Armitage: I don’t want to meet you at a stage door, or on the street anywhere; I don’t want to have my photo snapped with you. I don’t want your autograph; I don’t want to write you a fan letter. (No offense to anyone who wants those things, they’re just not on my list.) Laying aside the question of whether this blog or anything said on it or any other blog might be an attempt to coerce you, or whether it constitutes some kind of stalking, something that I worried about a lot last summer, in the end I have ever lesser interest in any kind of conventional fan encounter that involves you, which is all I’d ever be able to permit myself to have in real life. Yeah, I’d go see you perform in a theater; I’d even fly transatlantically to do that, and despite the objections of critics, not think that was crazy, and confine it to the aesthetic and the intellectual, although the horizon of that possibility seems to be receding rapidly in light of both your and my career choices: you’re getting more prominent, and I’m getting unemployed.

But: I’d like to prune trees with you. Or spend an afternoon walking through a museum and not talking about what we see (I think of you as someone who could do that — it’s hard for most men, who seem to need to impress) until we’ve seen it at length. I sometimes sit in faculty meetings, as this afternoon, and wonder what you’d think if you could observe this nonsense. What you’d think of my friends. What I’d think of yours. I’d like to argue with you about something vital. I’d like to discuss with you how you build a character sometime when you’re actually in the process of building one. I’d like to drive cross country with you in the U.S. and feud in friendly fashion over who controls the radio. I’d like to know what you think of The Great Gatsby. I’d like to make you some sweet corn and sit out on the back porch and then compete to see who can throw more cobs accurately into the compost from a distance, and have my dad yell at us both for making a mess and attracting mosquitoes into the house. I’d like to you fix the cabinet hinge in my kitchen that’s always sticking. I’d like to test the quality of your reflexes. I’d like you to whisper my name in my ear to wake me up some morning. I’d like to drink a pot of tea with you while reading the newspapers. I’d like you to come to my lecture on Gaskell and the Industrial Revolution and tell me what you think. I’d like to throw a fluffy snowball and hit you smack in the nose and then pay the price you exact afterward. As you see, Mr. Armitage, my fantasies about myself in regard to you are both smaller — and so much larger — than my reactions to any of the characters you’ve played.

I’m not allowed to write these things because I’m not supposed to think them. There’s another weird paradox there that has something to do with their danger and that I don’t completely understand. That is, it’s dangerous to admit to these things — inappropriate? obsessive? stalkerish? — but it is also quite frankly dangerous to lie to myself and say those thoughts have never occurred to me. As if somehow not admitting all this could make it not real! The not thinking them is not working — so that when these images of a bound, tortured Porter push my buttons, my fantasies involve teasing and motions in the direction of rape because I frankly felt and feel out of control with regard to you. I want to leave John Porter tied up in my mind as payback for the fact that I will never have any of these things — so little in my fantasies as in my reality.

[Photo: Bernini, Pluto and Persephone, 1621/2]

The question, I suppose, is why not. For readers weak on Greek mythology, here’s a recap of the Persephone myth. She has to keep going back to the underworld because of the pomegranate seeds she eats while she’s there before she’s rescued. For me this was the uncanniest part of the comment. Can Hades have Persephone? Only if he traps her. In the end Persephone would always be away, in the colorful living part of Earth, if she weren’t compelled to stay in the underworld for part of the year. His very attempt to grasp her is what puts her beyond his reach in any meaningful — in the sense of non-compelled — way. His insistence on having the object of his desires within his reach is that he will never really touch her completely. So yes, it makes sense that this sort of fantasy is a way of dealing with the fact that Richard Armitage is an unattainable object for me. But — and more importantly for me: no, I cannot write a fantasy in which Porter stays with me. The point for me in the Persephone story has always been not the sorrow or barrenness or necessity or anxiety of her seasonal incarceration in the underworld, but her apparent compulsion to return to her other life. Hades loves her, but she won’t be moved by that. Eating the pomegranates did not make her want to stay with Pluto — it just forced her to. But what was so bad about Hades? Besides the fact that he lived in the underworld?

One of my fundamental convictions is that people don’t really change. A fantasy in which Porter wanted to prioritize a relationship over his calling requires a personality change of the sort that I don’t ultimately believe in for the purposes of my own fantasies. But the other piece of that is that I am not very sentimental; my capacity for that, if I ever had one, has been leeched out of me over the years by experience. And that’s the more traditional reading of the Persephone story. It’s not called a rape for nothing — Hades compels her, and she submits. But she doesn’t want to. Part of the fantasies I’m writing is that, on the whole, I let Porter go either before he can reject me — and the signs of his rejection are obvious in every single fantasy. I don’t know what’s so bad about me. Aside from the fact that I spent most of my time in the underworld.

If I believe that people don’t really change, it’s perhaps because I am the best example. Writing and performing Servetus are, inter alia, attempts on my part to be someone else as a means of changing myself, but perhaps these fantasies of bondage don’t rewrite desire as much as they confirm what I’ve always known about myself. If Servetus could write a fantasy in which Porter fell in love with her and stayed with her, perhaps that would be a sign of the sort of redemption I’m looking for by writing. If I could free Porter and he would stay, maybe I would free myself from my own underworld.

Can stories change the world? Can we change ourselves by writing different stories about ourselves? It’s worth thinking about.

~ by Servetus on April 28, 2011.