Reasons I love Richard Armitage in Strike Back, #1

Today’s Monday Classic FanstRAvaganza, posted on facebook, comes from Reviewerama, a blog written by Ragtag, one of the original 2010 FanstRAvaganza bloggers who’s since taken a blog break. In it, she describes the “gorgeous, smoldering truth” and the effect that it had on her behavior.

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Richard Armitage, selling Strike Back to an entertainment reporter, at the BAFTA premiere screening, April 15, 2010. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

Since Jane aired her disapproval of Strike Back as an artistic and career choice, I’ve been thinking about why I liked it so well, admittedly against my own expectations. It’s not the kind of thing I’d have watched if Richard Armitage weren’t in it. I subscribe to everything she said about it as a career choice — it wasn’t the kind of role that was going to get Mr. Armitage invitations to do Shakespeare in the West End or anywhere else. It certainly exploited his sex appeal, and it’s true that doing so is an at best ambivalent strategy if he wants higher profile roles in more respected genres. I agree that it’s the kind of project that can lead serious critics to dismiss an actor’s career if he does too many of them. I think she’s right that for whatever reason, it matters less if Armitage puts himself through physical ordeals to make this sort of thing than if he did the same for an “artsier” film that got more subtle critical attention. Although I think she’s right about all of that, it doesn’t have much personal effect on me. Partially I react this way for the reasons that I have already aired in my two posts on the question of Armitage and the necessity of great art at extreme length (part one / part two), so I won’t rehearse them here, but suffice it to say that “great art” isn’t a concept that influences me much. As someone who’s spent all of her professional life writing things that will be read by perhaps a few dozen people at most — I’m not kidding; thousands more people have read this blog than will ever read my published work under my real name — I would also guess there must be a pleasure in doing a project that large groups of people enjoy. It’s never been entirely clear to me from his interviews exactly what kind of career Richard Armitage wants, beyond wanting to continue to work, so my tacit assumption is that what he does pleases him (more or less), and though I’m not a friend or a relative of his, I do want him to do what most pleases him as long as it’s not illegal or hurtful to others in a specific, concrete way. Even if, as Jane would say, I still have opinions about things that may be none of my business.

Richard Armitage as John Porter in one of those crazily sexploitative ads for Strike Back. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

But I do think there’s an additional reason I loved Strike Back that’s not susceptible to Jane’s critique, and that’s just that Richard Armitage plays Porter so extremely well. He is fully Porter — there’s no condescension or irony at all in his performance, despite the many opportunities the production offered. She hasn’t watched most of it, so she can’t comment on that, but she would respond, I assume, that no matter how good he is in it, it doesn’t matter that much. And that’s a place where she and I diverge. That it doesn’t matter in all the larger senses she describes is for me, on some level, beside the point. It matters to me that he’s good in it. A lot of that’s me. I write this blog mostly for myself and to a lesser extent for other fans and to a tiny degree as an act of gratitude for the changes fangirling Richard Armitage has helped me make in my life, but it’s become increasingly apparent to me because of writing it that my love for it consists in it as itself, not in its capacity to serve as a vehicle for larger projects or lead to other things beyond its role as a reflection of the kind of self-actualization I’m seeking. In other words, I do think there’s an argument for Strike Back as successful in itself or in terms of Armitage’s performance, without it having to be “for” something bigger, and thus apart from all the framing issues we’ve discussed during the last week.

So: Why was Armitage’s performance so good? I’m giving this post title a #1 because I think there are other reasons besides the one that occurred to me this morning; who knows if I will get around to enumerating them all or not, though. At any rate, for anyone who felt sad last week, it’s now time for some Porter love!

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At one point I had considered starting a series called “too painful to watch” that would be an analysis of scenes that I sometimes fast forward past because Armitage’s performance is so good that the scene seriously upsets me when I watch it. Then I realized that in order to write a series like that I would have to commit to actually watching those scenes very closely in order to write about them. Blogging is supposed to be fun! Well, maybe I’ll still write a few of those posts. I’ve made a category. But here’s a scene from Strike Back 1.1 that falls in the “too painful to watch” category for me. It also demonstrates one sense in which Armitage was so good in Strike Back.

This is the scene where, after Porter’s been told he’ll be mustered out and agrees to it, he seeks work at Kenneth Bratton’s concern.

The scene is super kitschy in ways that point to all the reasons that critics usually eschew productions like this. We totally expect everything that happens in terms of plot, and we see all of our expectations expressed in the most stereotypical possible ways in the script. We expect that Porter will approach Bratton, but also that he will be turned down (script stereotype number one: veterans always expect consideration first from the people they protect, who are always insufficiently grateful for what they have received). We expect that Bratton will turn down Porter because he lacks the correct education (stereotype two: business owners value book learning over practical capacity, but also two-a: they are not ever justified in doing so). We expect that Porter’s reaction to the soft no will be overboard from the perspective of the people in the scene (stereotype three: wounded veterans always overreact to bad news) and that his overreaction will reveal a developing inability to cope / simmering mental illness (stereotype four: all combat veterans will develop PTSD). Since we’re sympathetic with Porter at this point, however, we’re also expected to accept that hurling objects through a glass window is a common manifestation of PTSD (stereotype five: PTSD always manifests itself in dangerous, violent behavior), which it isn’t, particularly. Besides the script problems, the dialogue is completely predictable. And the last straw on the level of predictability is the casting of a sculpted metrosexual as the Bratton security guard. OK, maybe that’s the penultimate straw. There’s also the over-made-up secretary with the rolling eyes and the unnecessary scream.

And what do we see Armitage doing with this (let’s admit it) piece-of-crap script? The thing that my eyes fall upon over and over again in this scene is the way in which his performance visualizes Porter’s strength and his weakness, his impermeability and his vulnerability, in the same gestures. One thing the scene is supposed to do for the story is to show the humbling of the man in control — another stereotype about combat veterans since the wake of the Vietnam War being their apparent inability to function outside of their “native environment” — when he’s no longer in control. This could have been played a lot of ways, but what’s neat here is the way in which Armitage’s gestures of strength and weakness, of pride and humiliation, melt into each other seamlessly.

Look, for example, after 0:27, when Porter reacts to Bratton’s statement that he doesn’t have to sell himself.

Cap from the scene above. You’ll have to look at the scene itself to see what I’m talking about; I’m just putting this here to break up the text.

You have this interesting facial expression where he backs off from showing the relief he’s feeling at not having to complete his prepared pitch, but then just at the moment where he’s slightly lifting his head, he gets the information from Bratton that the jobs he has to provide are in Iraq. Then the camera shifts and we see his discomfort from a distance — but he’s moving his upper body in almost a squirm as he holds his physical position, which allows him to make an insistent claim for “something closer to home.” The suave, masculine move of putting his script in his pocket also moves that arm across his body in a way that seems unavoidably defensive.

John Porter (Richard Armitage) reacts to the information that Bratton recruits only people with academic qualifications in Strike Back 1.1. My cap.

Again, after 0:45, you see the emotional strong / weak, proud / humiliated move, but in the other direction. At this point Bratton is telling Porter that he only employs university grads at home in England. At 0:46 he’s almost tucked his chin down into his chest (and we’ve considered before how essential the jaw position is to the emotionality of the Porter character):

The same. My cap.

…but you see him pulling out the humiliation gesture in a sort of laugh of incredulity that begins at 0:47 with a head twist:

The same. My cap.

By 0:50 a slightly shamed, bowed-head incredulity is merging into a hostile incredulity:

The same. My cap.

and at 0:52 the anger is fully evident on his face:

The same. My cap.

and then at 0:54, the incredulity merges into subliminal threat, with the incredulity underlying the whole moment still:

The result is a sort of five second move through about seven shades of the same emotion, without ever fully marking the boundaries of any kind of transition between them. The result is that we start with the vulnerable Porter, sitting in a chair, awaiting his chance to sell himself to the man he saved:

The same. My cap. And I’ve talked about the gestural choices that make Porter look so vulnerable at this moment here.

And we end with the Porter who’s stronger than anyone in the room:

My cap. The same.

I’m not thrilled with the stage direction for Porter to smash the window — and I can’t imagine that, based on what I understand about Richard Armitage’s ideas about not showing everything he thinks on screen, that it would necessarily have been his choice, either. But it ends up being beside the point, because the effect of the scene is a sort of paradox: the strong man humiliated and humiliating at the same time. The successful portrayal of the paradox means that the stereotypes fall by the wayside. We can’t bear to watch Porter’s humiliation because we sense that he can’t bear to experience it, either, and his struggle to find a mediating place between strength and weakness is laid out in every move of his face.

So yeah. It’s crap. Richard Armitage is really good in it — and I can get fascinated even watching scenes that I find painful. And it doesn’t matter to me, then, what the critics think or what the role might mean. I am, quite simply, entranced.

~ by Servetus on January 24, 2012.