And we’ll know that it’s Richard by his nose, by his nose: or, a short prolegomenon to Armitage nose logistics

Title of the post with apologies to Christians and prolegomenists (people who write prolegomena). I’m always torn when a new piece of news comes up — can I comment on it immediately? I rarely do, mostly because I am always thinking about contexts and putting together a context takes time. Anyway, yes, I was thrilled when I read the Eric Vespe report with accompanying photos. This is a stream of consciousness discussion of a couple of the many contexts I thought of.

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From the location filming of The Hobbit. Source: Ain’t it Cool News.

Just in from twitter: more photos of Armitage on location may surface. Oh, I hope so. Even just one? Please, Mr. Armitage? Please, Mr. Jackson?

One of the first things I reflected upon in the search for Richard Armitage in these pictures was that I like seeing photos of him when he’s not looking at the camera. No, not stolen photos of his private life, but rather photos of him standing around when something else is going on. It makes him seem more normal, somehow, and not so much larger than life as he often does when he turns his full wattage at the lens. I’m thinking here in agreement with Jane’s recent comment about candid photos from sets he’s been on.

The possibility that someone in these photos could be Richard Armitage also made me think of this screencap from the “Hood Academy” feature included in the DVD set of series 1 of Robin Hood:

Jonas Armstrong being interviewed for the “Hood Academy” feature, series 1 of Robin Hood. Richard Armitage stands at right, holding the banana, his mouth in position to prepare for mampfing. Source: Richard Armitage Central Main Gallery

The second matter was, of course, to ponder the basis upon which the identification of Armitage could be made. I first saw the report linked on RichardArmitageNet.com, with the initial comment: “in one picture of the dwarves on horses, that might be him emerging from behind a rock.” It was later amended to include: “(on second thoughts, I think it’s Kili/Aidan Turner).” Now, I’m sure that someone who follows all this much more closely than I has made a definitive pronouncement by now, but at the time I had to laugh at the identification because I want to know, too, but I didn’t think we could tell either way. I know exactly how this provisional identification might have been made, though: click on the picture above (or download it) and zoom in on the figure of the man in the blue smock emerging from behind the rock and look at his profile. I’ve put in a little red circle to help you in the photo above, or, at left, a cutout from a screenshot. We can’t see the guy’s face, but we might be able to catch a glimpse of his nose. (Of course, probably every dwarf in the scene is wearing a prosthesis and has a larger-than-human nose.) Since Mr. Armitage makes jokes about his nose off and on, he might find this chain of reasoning amusing. I hope. We love you, Mr. Armitage !!! We especially love your nose !!!

So, following this stream of consciousness on the topic of the unique qualities of Richard Armitage’s nose — which is so distinctive that we use it to identify him at a distance, from the side, behind a rock — I began to think of something that I had wondered when vlog #4 came out, and actually did a little experiment with, but hadn’t had time to write up yet. I was looking at the picture of Thorin’s nose (sorry to keep posting this image, but I keep loving it and loving it!):

Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield in pre-production vlog #4 from The Hobbit. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

So, you know me, it’s hard for me to look at anything casually. This time, I was looking closely at the nose prosthesis. They haven’t built up the glabella  — which was a good choice, since if you’re Mr. Armitage’s director, you want those corrugator supercilii muscles to be able to work unimpeded, I think — or the root of his nose, but they began with the prosthesis right at the lateral surface of the nose where it joins the cheek, and the device reshapes his own ala and the alar furrow (see diagram at right for terms). When we see Armitage in closeup, we almost always see a glimpse of the inner surface of his nasal septum, but this prosthesis eliminates that view. Now, in the end, I don’t think the extension of the apex on the prosthesis is all that much further out than his actual nose — maybe a centimeter at very most — but the curve of the actual Armitage nasal bones (for anatomical location of nasal bones and cartilages, see diagram below at left) seems to be either inverted or expanded outwards.

For comparison purposes: The right wing of Richard Armitage’s nose. Richard Armitage as Lucas North and Laila Rouass as Maya Lahan in Spooks 9.8. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

Focus your attention! The cutout at left may help you to get your mind out of the gutter!

So you know, in your own life, although your nose is in your line of vision, you sort of mentally edit it out and don’t notice it. I have kind of a big nose (though admittedly not as big as Armitage’s) with pretty fleshy alea and apex. It’s big enough that if there’s a pimple or dirt on it or something I see it, but in day-to-day life I mostly ignore it, just as I do the margins of my spectacles. This must be a kind of evolutionary adaptational mechanism to prevent homo sapiens who are distracted by the size of their own noses from being eaten by predators while they stare, transfixed, at their proboscises. But I wondered what would happen if my nose were suddenly a great deal bigger, as if I were wearing a prosthesis. Would I adapt to its presence on my nose, or would I have to rebalance my walking and so on in order to accommodate the fact that I was now constantly actually noticing my own nose?

Ever the intrepid researcher, the day after I saw the photo above, I broke off a piece of pencil in the morning and taped it (with some sports tape that the last faculty member to occupy my office left in the desk) to my nasal bone, with one end starting just where the bridge of my glasses begins, covering the place where the cartilage of my septum attaches, and down to the tip. I did this at about 10 in the morning and figured I would leave it there until 3:15 p.m., when I leave my office to get my lecture room set up to teach, and see if I got used to it.

I just have to say: this was a horrid experience. Maybe it would have been better if I had had an actual prosthesis, professionally applied, but I totally underestimated how annoying the pull from the sports tape was going to be. Secondly, my fake prosthesis was a constant and serious distraction while I was working. I honestly thought it would take me an hour or two to accommodate my depth perception (as it does when I switch glasses), but even after five hours, I was constantly seeing it while reading. It makes me wonder whether, if my nose were bigger than it is, I’d have a nose job to facilitate getting more reading done. Thirdly, it was a serious obstacle to walking — and it’s not like I walked that far, back and forth to the department office a few times and once to the library and back and twice to the bathroom. (And yeah, people gave me a few funny looks, but this is a university, and I am totally out of the running for “most bizarre professor in the department,” even when I tape a broken pencil to my nose.)

I guess the conclusion is that it strikes me as amazing that anyone can act with all that stuff on his face. I imagine that he’d get used to it after a few applications, but I wonder how he accommodates his panoply of facial expressions to the pull of the stuff on his nose and forehead and chin. You can tell from the photo above that the face and eyebrows will still be able to do a lot — but one suspects that Mr. Armitage’s voice is going to be just as important as we thought it would be and potentially even more important in his portrayal of Thorin.

So after thinking about what he’d do to deal with this issue, I of course following the continued stream of consciousness to postulate that in the course of his career, Mr. Armitage has naturally already had to make numerous nose accommodations. I suspect that this issue is of greatest consequence to him when he’s about to kiss someone. The head-on kiss is probably hard for him to accomplish and possibly the most dangerous for his leading lady should the maneuver fail.

One thinks, for example, of the first time that Lucas North kisses Sarah Caulfield, in Spooks 8.2.

It honestly looks like they had choreographed the kiss differently, with Armitage planning to hold his head straight and Genevieve O’Reilly to tilt hers, but as if at the last second, he realized that her head was going in the wrong direction and he needed to accommodate. I’m never sure with Spooks if this sort of thing is the result of not filming enough takes (one things of the unromantic tug on the sheets at the beginning of Spooks 8.4 made to keep Armitage’s butt covered up — it’s unclear to me why this tic couldn’t have been edited out), so they just had to put in a bad take for this scene, or if it’s a characterization move, i.e., if Armitage is portraying decisiveness or aggression here. The fact that he continues the scene with his hand on the back of her head could point in the latter direction.

Then, there’s the very cautious kiss Lucas North gives Maya Lahan, in Spooks 9.3.

I love this scene, and I just noticed that I have 1700 words of draft about it still lurking, besides what I said in my original episode review, so more on this kiss sometime, but here it looks like what they’re going for — this sort of tantalizing reaching out for the past — is being somewhat conditioned by his caution about bumping her in the face, because at 0:14 he has to change the angle of his head. The people who don’t like this kiss often cite that moment in particular as problematic.

One winner in both these kisses is that you can hear him breathing in like crazy through his nostrils. (I always wonder if these things are picked up in the shoot themselves or have to be dubbed in afterwards. Does Armitage have a breather double?) And a good Armitage kiss always ends with a solid nose smush:

John Bateman / Lucas North (Richard Armitage) kisses Maya Lahan (Laila Rouass) in Spooks 9.3. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

The smush must contract his skin pretty aggressively. I’m thinking here of the kiss in John Porter’s dream in Strike Back 1.3.

Frighteningly sexy kiss, and from the beginning of it, in the portion behind the blinds (brilliant shot, camera people — I find that really titillating) we learn that he can tilt his head in either direction while kissing, but at 0:16 he’s got his nose pressed into her right cheek, and the pixels just can’t keep up with all that skin motion any more.

And from the beautiful to the ridiculous: during my Guy vidding I’ve inserted this little piece of Robin Hood 3.6 repeatedly as a sort of percussive divider, and I noticed something interesting that I’ve presented to you by slowing the clip 50%: When Guy is breathing in deeply during his tortured sleep, the camera closes in on the entrance to his nostrils and we something moving!

I guess if your nostrils are so relatively large, you’re at risk for finding all kinds of stuff in them.

Hey, Mr. Armitage, hope you know I’m teasing. You can pillow your nose on my cheek any time you like. Don’t change a nose hair for me, not if you care for me! And, if you prefer to kiss me straight on, I’ve even got a bit of a bumper on the tip of my own nose to help cushion the effect of any blow or collision.

And you, faithful readers? What’s your favorite Armitage nose moment?

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I dare you: make a gift in honor of Richard Armitage’s nose!

At left: my personal favorite of Richard Armitage’s JustGiving endorsements. ChildLine received more than a million calls from children in 2008/9, of which it was only able to answer 71%. Almost a fifth of these calls relate to bullying. ChildLine also helps about 1,400 children per year who express suicidal thoughts. ChildLine is affiliated with the NSPCC, a UK child protection charity. This is an organization that saves lives and deserves our help.

It’s that time of year again: a point at which we think about the needs of others in the midst of gratitude for the gifts we have received. Here’s a link to Mr. Armitage’s recommended charities at JustGiving and a link to Act!onAid, a child sponsorship organization for which he recorded a voiceover in December 2010. In 2011, Mr. Armitage also participated in fundraising efforts for Christchurch Earthquake Appeal. You can also generate a donation by doing any amazon.co.uk or Book Depository shopping that you do for the holidays via RichardArmitageOnline.com, or amazon.com or amazon.co.uk shopping via RichardArmitageNet.com, as these fansites both donate earned commission to charities that Armitage has endorsed. Fans have also donated in honor of Armitage to Oxfam International.

~ by Servetus on December 5, 2011.