You make me believe that a man can be gentle

This isn’t the initial piece of the whole story, which I’ve been trying in vain to write about for a long time, now, or even what happened next, which I have in a better draft form now, but it’s more of a status report on the last few months with attribution of causality.

Phase two or something. One explanation for Happy Armitagemania?

In my ongoing saga of wondering what the point of Armitagemania is, something finally occurred to me today (after over a year-and-a-half, geez).

A sweet moment, whether with sister or, apparently, girlfriend: Harry Kennedy (Richard Armitage) and his sister Rosie (Keely Hawes) burst through some underbrush in Vicar of Dibley: The Handsome Stranger. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

I was sitting at lunch, thinking about the current intensity and foci of my preoccupation with Mr. Armitage, the fantasies that are occupying my energy these days, and I was musing that I find that they’re increasingly sweet and they’ve been becoming more and more tender over the last two months. There are two pieces of this. The first relates to watching Richard Armitage.

Why does he make me feel tender? Obviously, because of his performance of tenderness. That’s how acting works — to move the soul and the heart. But of course I can’t leave it at that, I have to look for the pieces of the puzzle, what details make him seem tender to me.

As a partial answer to that question, something I find myself preoccupied with at the moment is the gentleness of Richard Armitage’s hands.

Gentleness, when John Standring cleans Carol’s burns:

The gentleness with which Phillip Durrant begins to open his tie:

The gentleness with which Mr. Thornton takes his teacup back from Margaret, and the way his right index finger moves:

The gentleness with which John Porter strokes Katie Dartmouth’s hair back from her forehead, and the way that, once he’s holding her head, his thumbs flex to continue the motion:

And the gentleness with which he checks the bandage on her amputation wound:

I think this last is particularly important to me because watching that scene calls my gender politics heavily into question. But focusing on his gentleness provides me an explanation that illuminates what I’ve been feeling lately.

It’s not even that the gentleness is always “used for good.” I could find plenty of instances of his use of his hands to caress, and of course, that’s entrancing, but just as compelling are his uses of his gentle hands for things that are not gentle.

For instance, there’s the gentleness with which Phillip Durrant grasps his wife’s hands — as if he were playing the fingerboard on a cello — even in expressing his suspicion that she’s a murderer — and the care with which he unfolds her fingers as he is about to kiss them:

And of course, one of Lucas North / John Bateman’s gentlest moments comes when he holds Denise Ortiz while she’s dying:

This sort of move heightens the tension of scenes in which it happens, and makes a character who’s evil seem even more evil.

***

I don’t know exactly why this moves me so much; it’s not like I’ve spent any significant time at all with brutal men (though I know there are plenty around). I think it’s more that the men I’ve known don’t use their hands with any care. They use their hands to accomplish things. Richard Armitage uses his hands that way, too, of course, although he’s always touching instruments, machines, guns, with the gentlest precision.

There’s the way that Peter Macduff serves the patrons at his restaurant, efficiently but gently locating the plate on the table:

Or the way that John Porter alias John Dean examines the blood diamonds he’s buying in order to get himself arrested and into Chikurubi Prison:

Or the careful way that Sir Guy of Gisborne moves his fingers first to, and then away from, his dagger:

I think what makes the difference for me is the capacity that Armitage has to use his hands to experience emotions, to feel in the emotional and in the physical sense simultaneously, and the fact that careful but confident, strong but gentle, is the primary mode with which he does that. A colossal example of the way in which he performs with his hands both practically and emotionally at the same time can be found in the scene from Strike Back 1.1 in which John Porter defuses As’ad, the young would-be suicide bomber:

This scene is all Armitage’s eyes and his hands — what we see in his eyes is reflected in his hands — both his capacity to act calmly and measuredly in taking the necessary steps to snip the wire, and in the way that his thumb pulls back gently once the danger is gone.

It’s a sort of synesthaesia in which ethics or personality looks like a particular sort of bodily gesture — so that emotion and perception are fused when we see it. Witness the scene from The Impressionists, in which Claude Monet expresses his excitement over his new ideas about painting by not only seeing, but actually feeling, the new colors:

Many of us have noted before that Richard Armitage acts with his hands. About a year ago, now, I detailed a very poignant example from Spooks 9.2, when Lucas / John is trying to find Maya by googling — a moment that may be unsurpassed in Armitage’s oeuvre thus far. I think what’s happening is that I’m starting to believe, when I watch Richard Armitage, that the acting gently with the hands as a way to be gentle is a real capacity that men might have. The convincing nature of many of these “everyman” roles has me extrapolating in the back of my mind from him to men in general.

Watching you, Mr. Armitage makes my heart so full, right now.

You make me joyful.

You make me hopeful.

You make me believe.

~ by Servetus on September 22, 2011.