Richard Armitage: brain musher or creativity spur?

Last week when I was caught whining, this was tweeted at me:

The tweet has stayed in my inbox, which means that every time I move to delete it, I start to think about it. It’s at the top now because I just answered every F3-related message left! Armitage has helped a lot with the discipline necessary for that. Since Thursday when I’ve been feeling a lack of resolve or a desire to procrastinate, I’ve been reminding myself of the caps from the latest Hobbit vlog and how they inspired me. But I do also have that experience of looking a picture and starting to feel my frontal lobes melt.

Especially this picture:

Richard Armitage, promo photo from still-unreleased interview for Recognise magazine, summer 2011. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

I’m not being funny, or not intentionally. I’ve thought about this problem a little, and one issue with this picture is that it’s so high resolution that I can look really closely at his skin, and everything about him seems a little surreal because of that. At times I find myself examining his pores, for crying out loud. In normal life I only do that with sexual partners — I don’t get close enough to anyone else! If I’m that close, I invariably find myself thinking about other stuff that I’d be able to perceive if I were that close to a man. His smell, for example, or body temperature, or breathing rate, or eyelid motions. I’m not sure that these high resolution photos do me a lot of favors in terms of concentration.

I’m not whining about them, though. On the contrary. I need photos like this for really, really bad days. If what I need is a pick-me-up from a disastrous moment, this is the kind of pic I go to because my physical response to it is visceral and instantaneous. Or, if I am extremely tense, a few minutes of photos like this can relax me. But they are dangerous if I’m in equilibrium and looking for inspiration. They are more anesthetizing than inspiring of flow, which is part of what I’m searching for in looking at the pictures, at least when I want them for inspiration.

A better candidate in a moment like that is a picture of Richard Armitage concentrating, like today’s Picture of the Day from RichardArmitageNet.com:

Richard Armitage training to become Guy of Gisborne. From the Hood Academy gallery at RichardArmitageNet.com

This image was taken during archery training. The focused gaze, the slightly pursed lips; both indicate focused attention and pursuit of a target. It’s like somehow by watching him cultivate flow, I can be moved to cultivate flow myself. In contrast, promo photos have him staring at me / viewers, and the focus isn’t always so clear, even if he has put his piercing gaze on for that purpose. Those photos are intended and designed as a projection of self, and his projection of his self is dizzying, intoxicating, distracting. I can bathe in that projection, and that’s good when what I need is a sloughing off of negative emotion or a restoration of lost or shaky equilibrium.

But flow involves not the drowning in the intoxicating self of the other (that’s something more like romantic love — in which I lose myself in you), but instead a loss of self, an attained unconsciousness of one’s own boundaries, a result through which something greater takes over the self. So I need to remember, when I need to get stuff done or words written, when I need flow, the point is to find a picture of Richard Armitage when he’s lost to self, a more prominent feeling in pictures of him from actual productions (when he is being someone else) or these photos that frame him at work, showing him losing himself in the presence of others whose job it is to record that loss.

I think that some of the Strike Back behind the scenes photos do this:

Richard Armitage as John Porter in a behind the scenes photo from the filming of Strike Back 1.1. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

I’ve written about the photo above before, as evidence of the tremendous concentration required for Richard Armitage’s job. It strikes me today that one outcome of concentration is loss of self, and that means focus on flow that permits the successful, effective, even perfect completion of the task at hand. As I’ve written, that’s what I get from the glimpses of Thorin that we saw in vlog #6. Not just joy, but the reminder of focus. Work as joy: do it now, do it completely, do it beautifully, do it fully.

At the end of the discussion of the forearms of the unidentified dwarf entering the barrel, Jane and I were speculating that if one reason (among many possible ones we could imagine) to leave Richard Armitage mostly in shadow in the last Hobbit vlog was a desire to avoid exposing what non-Armitage fangirl viewers are likely to perceive as a marked incongruity between Armitage the person and Thorin Oakenshield. But sloan raised the intriguing possibility that Armitage’s immersion at this point is so complete that there’s no more Richard Armitage: only Thorin.

Only Thorin? Richard Armitage and other actors playing dwarves storm across a New Zealand plain. Cap from preproduction vlog #6 from The Hobbit. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

If that’s true — if there’s no more Richard Armitage at the moment — now that’s flow. If I could achieve flow so consistently over days, weeks, or months that there simply was no more Servetus: breathtaking.

That’s a real reason to look at these pictures.

~ by Servetus on March 5, 2012.