Armitagemania, how it is nowadays

I’ve got like seven analytical posts half done and going nowhere, and this stuff banging around in my mind. So this is what is going in this space for right now. Maybe the analysis will come if I cop to this particular set of questions.

It’s that point in the year well-despised of professors, when the end is in sight but far enough off not to be easily sniffed or tasted. Several more weeks. Everything intensifies. If it all feels pointless, it will feel even more pointless; if everything causes anxiety, the anxiety will build; if deadlines are threatening, their threat will increase; the stupid excuses offered for transgressions will become ever stupider — as we all, professors and students, tilt toward the edge, the ridiculous ultima ratio of this strange universe we inhabit. Those who wanted the degree suddenly become interested in knowledge; those who wanted knowledge detach and declare their allegiance to the degree. Emotions and attitudes will be demanded from us and we will perform them; intensity for the struggling, the charade that it still matters; pity for the suffering; joy for the graduates and their parents; acquiescence to whatever plan is being made for the next phase.

The only thing that can ever make this phase bearable is desire. We want to want, to feel that desire that is now hidden under everything else that accumulates as we race to the end — no desire left, only destination. Unavoidable. We don’t want what we wanted before, it’s all meretricious, everything we thought we wanted, but we want so badly to want.

[At right: the reading textbook I (and the other girl who could read on the first day of school) had in first grade. Anyone else remember this one?]

All I had last year to get through the period after Spring Break was fantasy. And that hasn’t changed. It’s so much about the charge given to life by desire. Just feeling that jolt. Not about being desired, but about desiring. The reminder of the capacity to want — independent of whatever the target is. To modify slightly, perhaps, on Skully’s thesis — at this point, I don’t want to be desired, and so Richard Armitage’s desire is not something I usually fantasize about feeling directed at me, although that fantasy takes up its occasional moments. It’s not the whole story, or perhaps it would be better say that it’s a piece of a story. Primarily, however, my identifications in all of his roles tend toward seeing myself in the role he plays, and not in the role of the women he desires. When I see Armitage’s characters desire, I want to desire like Armitage desires — myself. I want to be displaying that subtle but incontrovertible arousal signal like something I can’t suppress or ignore, the widening of the mouth, the flaring of the nostrils. I want desire like that to submerge me. To unman me.

I want, in short, to be controlled, not by my reason or my sensibility or manners or practical concerns or even law — but I want to be overwhelmed by, subsumed in, my own desires. I want what I want to be so important that nothing I can think or say will let me question it or run away from it. I look at Lucas North / John Bateman and wonder how he managed that. I am so much less damaged than Lucas and yet I feel like my synapses of desire are all burnt out, or rewired to create anxiety rather than euphoria.

Someone who spent a lot of time desiring unworthy things: Lucas North (Richard Armitage) during his dream sequence encounter with Sarah Caulfield, in Spooks 8.4. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

There are always things about my fantasies that I have known are questionable to speak of in mixed company, and I wonder frequently how far I can go toward discussing them in this space. Every reader probably has her own list of things she’d find distasteful or be disturbed by — none of the strictures would apply to everyone. Writing about them as if they were fanfiction has always seemed deceptive to me. These are not things I think about as fictions, although I know they are not real. They have much more narrative coherence than do dreams. It only seems worth it if I can get the rush from the honesty and openness and introspection, and that includes accepting the extent to which I am affected by and also disturbed by them. I want to talk about the extent to which they permeate certain situations, make certain circumstances bearable or even pleasurable.

Wanting despite your better knowledge: Lucas North (Richard Armitage) makes love to Sarah Caulfield (Genevieve O’Reilly) after catching her in a lie in Spooks 8.5. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

I don’t think the danger of desire lies in the desire itself nor in how it affects the object of desire. In that sense, Richard Armitage is an object marketed to us for the fulfillment of our desires, whatever they might be, and he perforce accepts this status no matter how he might feel about it privately. All of us are someone for somebody, and his problems stem from a magnified version of the human condition. So I’m not influenced by worry about potential harm to Richard Armitage, although I know that would stop some people. Rather, I think the reason that desire for things we will never have — and I will never have Richard Armitage — is dangerous is twofold. First, it threatens to expose everything about one’s life that is really wrong. The momentary relief from desire necessitates its renewal because life without desire may not be painful, but it is also quite obviously less than it could be if it were constantly suffused with desire. This can actually be a strength — because the renewed capacity for desire can be a motivator for change, and this has been a significant function of Armitagemania in my life — but it’s rough to take a hard look at just exactly how unsatisfactory one’s life might be. Desire moves us along but we can’t get marooned in it. Second, there’s the question of what happens after desire. As my best friend from college, like me a fairly solid non-romantic, said to me about two years ago, sure, you have all this euphoria now, but what happens when the euphoria goes?

Wanting that thing you wanted for the sake of wanting it, or wanting some earlier version of yourself: John Bateman / Lucas North (Richard Armitage) kisses Maya Lahan (Laila Rouass) in Spooks 9.3. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

I haven’t had to answer that question because I still have the euphoria, every day, and my emotional reactions to watching Armitage, whether on video or stills, are becoming more and more intense. I am not habituated. Hand in hand with this trend, my fantasies are becoming more demanding. What were bedtime stories are now spiraling, epic, daytime stories. Armitage in my bed, in the shower, at the breakfast table, in the passenger seat of my car, at the back of my lecture room, in my faculty meetings, sitting in the corner of my office, reading, during office hours, and laughing behind a book at the things students say, Armitage massaging my shoulders as I lock the door and go home. Armitage taking over my classroom. Armitage moving my sofa. Armitage at my mercy, Servetus at his. Armitage in the oddest contexts, in churches and synagogues, in dive Chinese restaurants, expressing his opinion on Belgian style beers, as policeman, skipping through the hallways. Places where he doesn’t belong, places he transforms by occupying them, by making them tolerable, by making me think there could be some other potential way of looking at the world. Armitage holding my mind together. Armitage reminding me that I can desire, that desire is motive even when the motive may only be the end.

There are two problems here; first, there’s the ongoing issue of certain kinds of thing about Richard Armitage as an extended fantasy of self. If this is a fantasy of self, how occupied am I becoming with my own pleasure? And is that bad? Wanting to be overwhelmed by desire, prioritizing it? If my fantasy of him has this much power to affect me, to keep me walking on through the days and nights and rising every morning in a situation where I am gritting my teeth, what might it do in a situation where I was fully able to live out the fantasy of self? And what fantasy is it, exactly? (And yes, I know I have to finish the North & South posts to even begin to address this issue, even as they plague me.) I know that part of it is that the fantasy of self becomes powerful this time of year because everything becomes only about giving other people what they want. In that sense Armitage fantasy becomes the insistent clamoring of the repressed for recognition and personification. My desire is real, it exists too, it is legitimate, don’t forget it, don’t lose the path of desire in the cloud of demands. My desire wants to survive what other people want or what I think I have to do — and so protecting the fantasies of Armitage becomes about protecting the right even to have or admit desires. (Big implications for writing here — insofar as I’ve always felt that my “real” writing was for someone else and not for me, and that made me hate it and in turn, despise myself.)

Transgressive appetite bound? Richard Armitage as Guy of Gisborne in Robin Hood 1.8. My cap.

Second, though, in terms of continuing to write here about my desires and the way they get expressed in Armitage fantasies, if you’re wondering if “Richard Armitage” in this post is some sort of lapsus for “characters Richard Armitage has played,” you’d be asking yourself the same question as I have been for about three months now. I get the jokes but I am not always being funny even if you are amused. Could you handle it if I stated that this were not Thorin Oakenshield but Richard Armitage? Can I?

Back in those problematic fantasies, a reader observed that in every single one, John Porter left me. “When he’s free to go,” Lina writes, “he doesn’t stay.” He never stayed. Last year I was thinking about this question in much more concrete terms than I am now. Now I wonder: Is there a way, is it time, to find a way to make the desires stay? To let them win? I was wondering this eleven months ago:

If Servetus could write a fantasy in which Porter fell in love with her and stayed with her, perhaps that would be a sign of the sort of redemption I’m looking for by writing. If I could free Porter and he would stay, maybe I would free myself from my own underworld. [¶] Can stories change the world? Can we change ourselves by writing different stories about ourselves? It’s worth thinking about.

I’ve freed myself to make the fantasies much more powerful than they were even then, to let them be a structuring element of my day to day, minute to minute life. Can I use the fantasy to write a story about myself in which I can both identify and follow my desires, even under duress? If I admit them? If I accept them no matter their absolute counter-factuality, their impossibility, their scoff-worthiness?

And unbound, what can appetite do? Is it only anger, or can it be more? Can we insist on our own appetites? Richard Armitage as Guy of Gisborne in Robin Hood 1.8. My cap.

Honest discussion about desire is the first step, the only step, toward getting what I want. If watching Armitage means legitimating the desire to desire (as opposed to the desire to be desired), I can’t avoid concluding further that watching him makes me feel like when I want, I am not ridiculous for wanting. I may even be more attractive because of it. Tonight I am not going to talk about humiliation — and I concede that’s a problem with this reading, and I will get there, eventually, too, to discuss all the ways in which I feel humiliated by fantasy.

But even so, the Armitage example suggests: If I may be destroyed by it, I am also humanized, even ennobled, by desire.

~ by Servetus on March 30, 2012.