Fantasy dancing, or the frisson of regret about missing something you never would have had the chance to see anyway

For those of you who still remember these categories from Armitage epistemology, below I offer something like a “d” reading.

Quotidian partier, if skanky: Lee (Richard Armitage) opens the door to his hotel room in Cold Feet. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

I’ve written here, often enough, that the thought of actually seeing Mr. Armitage in the flesh leaves me heavily conflicted. But as I listen to more and more dance music in an attempt to keep the euphoria flowing and keep myself moving toward my goal, I do frequently think of one setting in which I wish I could see him. I’d like to see Richard Armitage dance. It’s a relatively specific setting that I have in mind, though.

Though I’m jealous of the people who got to see him dance on stage approximately a year ago, that’s not precisely what I mean. And, yes, I’ve see the Cats rehearsal videos, and while those make inspiring testaments to his artistic talent and physical control, that’s not quite what I mean, either. Not the impromptu dancing with friends from his late adolescence, either. (And: For those who think I’m dreaming of seeing him doing a strip tease, get your minds out of the gutter!)

Now that I’m having these fantasies that center around dancing, I’ve started to wonder what Armitage looks like when he’s dancing, not so much because I want to witness the snakehips style he’s said he hopes he has, or on account of the sexiness of the tango as his reported favorite dance, although I’ve speculated on the way the tango influences some other movements he’s made. Ballroom isn’t what I’ve got in mind, though I’ve wondered from time to time about how he might look in cowboy boots, doing the Texas Two-Step, which is the social dance I’ve probably seen most in the last years of my life (as opposed to the polka, which was big in Wisconsin). And yeah, I wonder how his gait would change if he walked in cowboy boots.

But the point for me isn’t display or performance; instead, I think, the connection to dance is about euphoria, at least this time. He’s said he’s the first on the dance floor because he loves the euphoria, and I think that my experience of euphoria while watching him makes me curious about how he experiences euphoria. Hearing certain kinds of bass lines that make me want to get out of my chair makes me wonder how he looks when he’s dancing just for his own enjoyment, not for any audience. Does he move his shoulders? Shake his head? Stand still and sway? Is he a modest, background dancer, or someone who other people pause to watch? How does he produce the flow experience for himself while dancing? These are things I’d really like to know. Cause yeah, the thought of Richard Armitage just jamming out somewhere, in a bar or a club, to music he particularly likes, engaged in unconscious pleasure — now that is really stimulating of euphoria for me.

The image I’ve been most constantly preoccupied with for the last ten days or so. From the still elusive Recognise magazine shoot. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

Of course, even if I some day see him on stage, I’ll never see him in a setting like that, and the desire to do so strikes me as vaguely sketchy, and not for the obvious reason that pursuing it would involve an unacceptable breach of privacy. It’s a problematic desire, I think, because the proposition is so inherently deceptive. I only have the fantasy of seeing Armitage experience euphoria for himself in the first place because of an objectification that has already occurred. This crush delivers information on the basis of representations that themselves reflect something that doesn’t exist, but which the form of the objectification causes me to desire. To take an example, if we desire to see a lion in the wild (for most of us, who aren’t running across wild lions every day), it’s because we have an idea of what that sight might be like based on our reaction to an objectification that’s already occurred: we’ve seen a lion in a zoo, for instance, or seen videotapes of lions in the wild, and we think that our response to the experience of seeing an actual lion would be (even) better. But our fantasy about the potential experience is, in turn, itself an objectification that involves another unreal circumstance, this time in which both observer and observed are unreal versions of themselves. At least when I watch something that’s an objectification, I can think of myself as a slightly stable subject: as if there is an actual “how I am that causes me to see this image in this way.” But in order to watch something that occurs in my fantasy, I have to construct both the object of the fantasy and myself as unreal: I become “how I would be if I were experiencing this particular fantasy.” The fantasy of myself becomes part of the fantasy of the thing I’m observing and in term gives that fantasy of the other additional energy.

Something like this occurs when I look at photos like the one above. In this case, the objectification that has already occurred is the one that makes Armitage’s glance elusive. “Look down,” the photographer has said, and Armitage has looked down, and a photograph has been taken of Armitage looking at the floor. What makes the photo tantalizing for me is the notion that I could cause his gaze to be forced up again to confront me as viewer and that I could then see him looking up, straight at me. The frame for this fantasy is the elusive downward gaze, an objectification created by the photographer; the explicit fantasy that relies on my idea that I know who I am is my explicitly articulated desire, in response to the photo, to make him look; and the fantasy of myself that is in turn required for that to happen is that I am in a position to make him look up and see him when he does. Most of the images in this series seem to trigger this triangular relationship by showing him looking away from the viewer, and they all signal the tension of the dressed / undressed binary somehow — even when he has a tie on, he’s fiddling with it (one reading, a sort of schoolboy gesture that signals discomfort and the desire to take the oh-so-confining or troublesome binding off) and when he has it off, he’s putting his hand in the place of the tie or else looking downward. Of all the images that I’ve seen so far from this series, only one has him looking at the camera, and in precisely that image, he’s got a very open collar and is fiddling with a cufflink, as if he’s dressing or undressing, as if the fantasy of the elusiveness of something (the naked body he could be moving toward, or covering up, depending on what exactly we think he’s doing with that cufflink) is being used to extend the intangibility of the image and forcing the viewer to insert her fantasy of what she’s doing every more insistently into the picture to give it a reading.

Back to where I started — the desire to observe Armitage experiencing euphoria for himself, as if he were not being watched, as if that could parallel my own euphoria in watching him from behind a computer screen: A lot of times when I listen to dance music I shake my head until I’m dizzy. I wonder if part of the effect of Armitage euphoria has to do with the way that it destabilizes me as an observer. I not only see the objectified frame for the fantasy in these interviews that discuss dance, which in turn create another fantasy Richard Armitage, dancing for himself in ignorance of any observer — the strength of these interviews is that they allow us to think that there’s something real behind all of the representations and images and fantasies they suggest –, but I think up a fantasy, decentered Servetus unencumbered either by reality or scruples, who can fully groove to that fantasy.

In short: I want to be the person I feel myself to be when I watch Richard Armitage. Or even when I think about watching him. Even if crushing is an inherently humiliating experience, watching him and creating these fantasies makes me feel strangely powerful.

It’s just one more way in which Armitagemania, the crush on Richard Armitage, seems to involve a dizzying, euphoric fantasy of the self.

~ by Servetus on November 10, 2011.