Richard Armitage, infinite infatuation?

Yesterday’s new Armitage pictures preview. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com. Uch, the clothes. Seriously, what did I spend all this time on, writing about how you should pick clothes, if you’re just going to let people put badly fitting stuff on you anyway?? Mr. Armitage, I’m beginning to despair. (Just kidding. Put on whatever you like. I do.)

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A slow week, posting here, but not in the blog backround, my “real life,” or in my Armitagemania case. Part of that was that I spent a lot of the last weekend preparing some interviews for fan showcases I’d planned to run over the summer and am still doing (and if you’re still in my interview queue, do not lose heart! I am going to work on them again this long holiday weekend!) and part of it was the inevitable time suck associated with a new campus, new students, getting twelve new logons for different systems, rerouting all my mail, etc., here, and getting into the meat of classes. I also got inspired by the pictures from Recognise Magazine that appeared yesterday (apparent ratio messup notwithstanding) and turned again to formulating my next post in the Armitage barbatus series, which got hijacked by my move, but which I will finish or bust! And part of it was that I spent most of my free time and an unreasonable amount of the hours I should have been sleeping over two entire days writing a fanfic. This frustrates me because it will never see the light of day, except perhaps in excerpts, but it seems part of the cost of doing business, in that I’m still infatuated, and I have to let it out. Yup, still suffering as badly as I ever was.

I’m not judging myself anymore, except in jest, but half a million hits (! — who’d ever have thought that would happen ??!?) still seems like an appropriate point at which to muse on this again. Still no answers, even if I’ve decided to go with radical acceptance — not only expressing myself involuntarily, as when I began writing here, or voluntarily, as it developed over the course of the first year, but now enthusiastically. I think the big symptom of this is the fanfic. I just write down whatever I think or daydream, trying to suspend my judgmentality as much as possible while writing. I love the daydreams. Charles Simic wrote a lame article on his reintroduction to boredom during Hurricane Irene, when his power went out. He rediscovered boredom — which I found embarrassing to read just because he’s one of my favorite poets and this admission makes me feel sorry for him. A poet is bored if he doesn’t have a computer? I have to say, if I my power went out for days, and I had food and running water, I’d snuggle right up and daydream about Richard Armitage and his characters till the lights went back on. I don’t have Internet service in my apartment yet, so that’s always an attractive option for when I go home.

Anyway, what strikes me today, as I think about it, is a weird boundary development issue that’s manifested itself in my Armitagemania. On the one hand, as certain things become more real, other things are becoming less so. As I said above, I’ve accepted that my own fantasy life is real and meaningful. No more saying that I’m crazy because I have certain fantasies, or that they don’t mean anything, or that they’re unacceptable, or that they distract me from “reality,” a territory from which they are somehow supposed to be distinct. No more shame that all of this is a timewaster that drags me away from important things. This surge of energy is the most important thing that’s happening to me right now, and it’s happening because of Armitagemania. So the question is, what happens to the part that I’ve always accepted as real, albeit in a relatively troublesome sense, i.e., the fangrrling? The fangrrling is on some level the real ethical obstacle to simply descending into fantasy, as its object is a real person. At least ostensibly. Or does the problem of fangrrrling really pose an ethical obstacle at all?

I was tweeting last night with a fellow blogger, and the conversation turned to the intensity of fandom (apparently we were called cray cray yesterday) and the matter of how we and our fellow fans see ourselves in relationship to Mr. Armitage. In doing so, we identified a division in fans between those who feel themselves to be relating, apparently, to Richard Armitage himself, and those who claim or acknowledge that the intensity of their fascination relates to a fantasy of or about Richard Armitage. To restate: it’s a difference between acknowledging that one is adoring Richard Armitage, and acknowledging that one is adoring a fantasy of Richard Armitage — hope that’s clear. I thought this distinction was interesting, should it hold, because I think in essence that (a) both of these choices in fangrrling seem to be reasonable options because the publicity machine obviously blurs the reality / fantasy line on purpose — and indeed, that’s part of the power of the experience, thinking that something about the fantasy could be real makes it even more enticing, but that (b) all of us, on both sides of the distinction are actually involved in a fantasy about Richard Armitage. It’s just that one kind of fan is convinced that what she is experiencing is totally and utterly a fantasy, while others embrace a fantasy in which the appearance of reality is part of the charm and part of what makes the experience compelling. I don’t think the line is hard and fast for everyone. People move between the groups, both in the course of their attraction, and on a day to day basis. For what it’s worth, at the moment I’m mostly in the “Richard Armitage is only / completely a fantasy” group — probably 80% of the time, anyway. While that means that some moments of fandom play out differently for me than for others (hypothetically, for example, anger at him isn’t really a likelihood for me as long as he’s not real — since if he’s not an actual agent, he can’t be responsible for acting in ways that I don’t like — and I find myself relatively uninterested in the occasional tweet about whom he’s dining with in Wellington if it doesn’t enhance the fantasy), it doesn’t mitigate the intensity of my infatuation even one bit. I still wake up every morning thinking about the man and his work. I do think the other position is different, though. It’s a weird sort of effect to me that if I participate in the “Richard Armitage is real” version of the fantasy, it’s simultaneously more potent because of the emotional force of the Armitage permutation of the ontological argument (“The greatest thing in the world must exist! Existing makes him even better than a fantasy! Just think, I could meet him some day!”) but also more troublesome precisely because if he’s real, as someone who thinks of herself as an ethical person, I shouldn’t want to encounter him in the way that actually makes me want to meet him in the first place, i.e., as a person meeting a (fantasy) actor / person (“Since he’s a real person, I shouldn’t overwhelm him with my craziness, since a caring person wouldn’t do that!”).

Honestly, I don’t think I’m in any ethical danger yet, but I suppose thinking about all of it as fantasy makes it safer. Potentially I’m kidding myself, of course. I’m not sure I’m done on this journey; no doubt I’ll come to regard all of this stuff differently as time passes. It seems weird to me that as I accept the reality of the unreal (noted above), the unreality of the real seems to grow. As my fantasies grow stronger, the real Richard Armitage recedes and I acknowledge more and more that everything I write about him involves a fantasy or fantasies. The possibility that he would be real is, increasingly, too dangerous for words. Were I in love with someone real, then I’d want to meet him; were I to want to meet him in a meaningful way, I’d be crazy, liable to accusations that my fangrrling is out of control. Why worry about a hypothetical problem? It’s not like I’m going to meet the real Richard Armitage anyway, either from a distance on a red carpet or by speaking to him at length, which I still occasionally fantasize about. But even so, there are very real stakes here. At first Armitagemania kept me sane; though it still plays that role, thinking about the fantasy is now also clearly a source of energy and creativity. I don’t want it to go away, or perhaps I’m afraid of what will happen if it does. If Armitage does not have the potential to be real, will the fantasy persist? If I am not focused on the fantasy of Armitage, will I go back to suffering and emotional paralysis? Will I stop being able to write? Am I continuing to fangrrl and fantasize out of some kind of fear of relapsing into the unhappy period Before Armitage? What I ever have to do to keep the fantasy underway, I want to do it. That, in itself, sounds a bit desperate.

Potentially, but I don’t think I’m in a lot of danger of it going away. The other thing we were talking about that I found interesting was the question of sensation in response to the fantasy Armitage — and why it is that a glance can trigger such a wave of euphoria. I’ve had this experience, after a brief Armitage break, and so have sister bloggers. There’s a deceptive similarity between the infatuation of Armitagemania and the beginning of feelings of love, and I’ve experienced this confusion myself as Armitagemania has developed. I said in the twitter conversation that I thought that something in this fandom was comparable to never leaving the infatuation stage of a love affair, indeed never having the opportunity to do so because one is prohibited from it by having to acknowledge its fantasy nature all the time, and fellow blogger agreed. Obviously, it’s a truism to note that none of us will ever have the chance to fall out of love with Richard Armitage in the conventional sense, because we never fell in love with him in the conventional sense, either. We will never experience the common triggers for that effect as they occur in relationships with people we know. We’ll never find out about his dirty laundry, putatively self-revealing articles in which he divulges that he has some notwithstanding, have to brush our teeth in his messy bathroom on the potentially embarrassed morning after, or have the chance to discover that he’s a boring workaholic.

But we may always, or at least for a long time, have the infatuation. It’s the thing that keeps us poised on that unclear boundary between real and fantasy, it’s the thing that’s simultaneously deceptively real and obviously fake, it’s the frisson of possibility that makes every renewed encounter with even a picture of him an opportunity for an unparalleled wave of euphoria. Infatuation is real enough to entice, but never so real that it has to confront any difficulties. Therein lies its power and (I suppose) its inherent betrayal of the real. Right now, though, I’m embracing the power.

~ by Servetus on September 4, 2011.