Armitage fumans, or: why Servetus loves Armitage when he smolders

[This post is not politically correct. A friendly warning: If you can’t tolerate any neutral, accepting, or even positive statements about tobacco smoke, smoking, or smokers, now would be a good time to close this window.]

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I pause for a brief public service announcement. Smoking is harmful to your health.

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So, having preached the obligatory sermon, let me say what I really think.

Heresy number one: I think smoking is beautiful. Sexy, even. I’m not the only one: witness this blog of beautiful pictures of people smoking, with a photo of Tolkien currently on the top.

Heresy number two: I especially love watching smoking when Richard Armitage smokes.

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First, I love it when he does it for roles.

I love when Ricky Deeming does it. I love watching the ritual of a smoker rolling his own. I love the industry of Ricky’s careful attention to rolling his own. I love people who roll their own.

Ricky Deeming (Richard Armitage) under interrogation in George Gently: Gently Go Man. My cap.

I love the thumbshot I get while he’s preparing to roll it, from the nervous motion he makes with his right hand:

Ricky Deeming (Richard Armitage) prepares to roll a cigarette during his police interrogation in George Gently: Gently Go Man. My cap.

I love that I get to see his tongue when he seals the cigarette paper:

Ricky Deeming (Richard Armitage) seals his cigarette after rolling it, in George Gently: Gently Go Man. My cap.

I love how he raises his hand to his mouth:

Ricky Deeming (Richard Armitage) smokes a cigarette during his interrogation in George Gently: Gently Go Man. My cap.

And the cool way he puffs it, and what he does with his lips at the same time:

The same. My cap.

Moving on to another smoking role, I love it when Percy Courtenay smokes. I love the obvious enjoyment it reveals on his face:

Percy Courtenay (Richard Armitage) in Miss Marie Lloyd. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

I love the way that it signals simultaneously something about both his tendency toward infidelity, and about the way that he puts himself together to engage engage in it. Look at the way he pulls down the corner of his nostrils. It functions as a wonderful sign of the just the kind of inner ambivalence and contradiction that Richard Armitage loves to give his characters — the mean man who is also weak. The way Armitage makes Percy Courtenay smoke lets us see all this.

Percy Courtenay (Richard Armitage) in Miss Marie Lloyd. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

In the character of Percy Courtenay, smoking relays both concentration, control, and an air of sovereignty …

Richard Armitage as Percy Courtenay in Miss Marie Lloyd. My cap.

… and its opposite,  the temporary ecstasy and loss of care that motivates people to engage in whatever their society constitutes as absolute debauchery:

Percy Courtenay (Richard Armitage) engages in an orgy in Miss Marie Lloyd. My cap.

I love it when Claude Monet does it, too:

Richard Armitage as Claude Monet in episode 3 of The Impressionists. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

I love how smoking becomes the expression of a contemplative, convivial male homosociality in several scenes of The Impressionists. Also, it seriously adds to the architecture of his face somehow.

But: best of all, I love that Thorin Oakenshield has a pipe:

Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) in the trailer for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

I love it because if you’ve ever seen anyone who knows how to blow smoke rings do it, it’s fun to watch. I love it because the scene at the dinner party where Gandalf and Thorin blow fanciful shapes with their pipes was tremendously memorable to me as a child, and still warms me as an adult reader of the book. I love it because I know there’d be a temptation to edit this bit out of the script in order to influence the rating of the film (as apparently the last trailer has been edited in order to allow it to be shown during G-rated film screenings; oh wait, this just in from people who have seen it: only slight modifications to the smoking parts). I love it because as a historian I am troubled by attempts to disinfect the past when it doesn’t fit our conceptions of it.

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OK, you say, he can do it for roles, but I don’t want him to do it personally. I, however, also am fine with saying that I am happy if Richard Armitage the person smokes, too. Not least because I suspect that the fact that he has actually smoked in real life makes it a lot easier for him to do it convincingly while acting. But also because it’s just beautiful. I only have two pictures of Richard Armitage the person smoking, and I suspect you know them already.

In this one, I wouldn’t even have noticed it if it hadn’t been mentioned by someone else.

Behind the scenes photo, filming of North & South: Richard Armitage as Mr. Thornton and Daniela Denby-Ashe as Margaret. Source: I can’t find the facebook page where I downloaded this, but I believe it was bccmee who uploaded it.

Then there’s this one, more widely available. In this particular sequence of behind-the-scenes shots, almost every other person is smoking. I can understand that, given the reasons that many smokers give for doing it: it occupies the hands, it helps one maintain one’s concentration, it is a way of dealing with boredom. There must be a lot of hurry up and wait on a television set.

Behind the scenes filming for episode 2 of North & South. At left, Richard Armitage, Daniela Denby-Ashe and Jo Joyner. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

But I honestly love how he delicately he holds his hands around the cigarette. That photo can be hugely enlarged. I love the articulation of each finger, the elevation of his thumb. Surely, if Thornton smoked cigarettes (he doesn’t smoke, in the scene in from episode 1 of North & South where the masters are dining at Marlborough Mills), isn’t this how he’d hold his hands? And I’d love to see what it looks like when he exhales.

It’s just beautiful. Mr. Armitage, I would watch you smoke, just for the pleasure of it. You don’t have to smoke, I don’t require it of you, I understand if you have stopped for any of the multitude of reasons that might be cited in favor of making that decision. I just want you to know: I’d watch you smoke, any day. And if you still smoke, and it makes you happy, I’d probably buy you some cigarettes.

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You’re welcome to find smoking ugly, of course. I just … don’t. Myself.

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From time to time my students — who, in the last five years or so, seem to have been charged by the media with being more promiscuous and drug-friendly than their predecessors — ask me about my own youthful drug usage. I laugh, though I’m secretly flattered that they think I could ever have been so wild. A good Lutheran girl, only allowed to go out with other youth from her own church, growing up off the beaten path, a Girl Scout during the Reagan years (“Just Say No!”), active in both band, playing a wind instrument, and singing in chorus? My virtue was both externally imposed and overdetermined. Messages about the negative consequences of illegal drugs and smoking were so omnipresent that I never even tried to smoke. No, not one puff (an experience that I share with Didion, despite her different socialization). Let alone “harder” stuff — although the physicist, who is seven years older and grew up in a more permissive atmosphere about recreational drugs, once tried unsuccessfully to get me to agree to taste a marijuana brownie.

I wasn’t virtuous. But was I lucky? No. For cultural reasons the drug of choice in rural Wisconsin was and remains alcohol, which is arbitrarily legal for certain users. But I had an alcoholic father, and I didn’t drink anything but wine during the Lord’s Supper until I well after I was of legal age. I wasn’t around it much apart from at home, because of the kids I was allowed to socialize with, and what I saw at home wasn’t exactly enticing. I waited until I had pursued the typical Servetus solution to anxiety: writing a research paper. Evaluation of then-current thinking about the genetic transmissibility of alcoholism when I was a junior in college reassured me that a single swallow wasn’t likely to suck me irretrievably into the bottle. I’m pretty sure I was twenty-two before I tried it, though. During the internship I had the summer after college, I made a game of asking coworkers what cocktail they thought suited me. They picked the vodka tonic, and that’s still my go to drink in a pinch. I’m no goody-two-shoes: as readers of this blog know, I love alcohol, especially beer. I love how it affects me. Occasionally I’m frightened by how much I love it. Why is my father an alcoholic, and why am I not? I don’t know and I don’t think anyone can explain it satisfactorily. The explanations that have been offered are all unsatisfactory because unconvincing.

Am I playing with fire? Probably.

But at least four things plausibly present a greater danger of addiction for me than alcohol. Caffeine (molecular structure at left). Internet. Food. Sex. Five things: I probably should put Richard Armitage on that list, since I spend way more time writing this blog than I do drinking. I don’t want to say, it’s all relative, but some of it is certainly arbitrary. Marijuana is illegal but booze is okay, which mostly makes me want to remark frivolously that it’s okay to endanger your liver but not your lungs. No one really disapproves heavily of caffeine — that popular Seattle coffee franchise will sell you sixteen shots — 1400 mg of cafffeine — at once, if you like, even if you’re doing it to test out their rewards program and don’t drink it — though nicotine in any amount, no matter how small, is currently demonized. (And let’s not get started on how much sugar one is not only allowed, but encouraged, to consume at one sitting.) If no dependency is harmless, then I’ve been really fortunate that the things I can’t live without are mostly legal. Don’t comfort me with Armitage addiction having no ill effects, because as everyone who’s read this blog for very long knows, I have certainly engaged in illegal activity as a consequence of Armitagemania, even if most people would consider my crimes minor.

I say all this about my own “drug history” to contextualize my remarks about smoking above and below, because I know some people will read this post as intentionally contrarian. Which it isn’t. I tend to be a “there but for the grace of G-d” person and I believe I could have ended up an alcoholic under different circumstances. We don’t know anything about the reasons why Richard Armitaged smoked or smokes. What I write above and below reports on my actual reactions to this question. I know my views are not in the mainstream but / and I don’t want people to think I have everything figured out. I just don’t see it as a dealbreaker. Or a reason to issue moral condemnations.

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So I’ll continue with the heresy — two more reasons why I have, and can, love a smoker who is still smoking and unrepentant:

First, I have at least as many positive as negative associations with smoking. I’ve experienced enough settings where smoking is a periodic pleasure that I don’t believe the customary claim that every occasional smoker is at risk of becoming a chain-smoking addict. I think of the dangerous look on the face of the guy I went out with in México when he had a cigarette between his lips and looked at me mischievously, in the breaks between literature classes. I think back in pleasure to nights in Guadalajara, where, after the consumption of dinner, the youngest child would sometimes be sent to a kiosk to buy a pack of cigarettes, and the adults in my host family smoked companionably in a relaxed atmosphere, one cigarette apiece. I think of transgressive smoking by Russian émigrés outside of synagogues everywhere, and the cloud of smoke that goes up with the excited conversation when people light up even though you’re not supposed to make fire on the Sabbath. I think of my ex-SO smoking on vacations — an occasional smoker, he only did it then — and enjoying both the way he held his cigarette, the way he pursed his lips, the cloud of smoke, and the look of satisfaction on his face afterwards. It made him so happy that I occasionally offered to buy him a pack. Rauchen regt die Verdauung an. I think of intense conversations in German cafés punctuated by the percussive, demonstrative extinguishing of a cigarette. I think of long nights in my friend Josephine’s garden, grilling, drinking, smoking. It’s not my particular pleasure, but I think it is possible for people to smoke responsibly, and with pleasure.

Did some of those people suffer health problems because of their smoking? No doubt. Does ingesting second-hand smoke have negative health outcomes? Certainly. I don’t think anyone would argue, anymore, that tobacco smoking is good for humans (although they did once). But my own legal addictions aren’t exactly all salubrious, either. Does smoking have public health costs? Yes, of course (although so do sketchy foreign wars, and I’m expected to pay for the rehabilitation of wounded veterans when if it were up to me, I’d keep them all home, safe in bed. I mean, if we could just trick out grenades with stickers that say things like “getting hit by one of these may cause serious, irreparable injury,” possibly with pictures of wounds, I’m sure that would stop people from throwing them). Bodies are frail. But I’m also — second reason — troubled by the way that we in the West have demonized not only smoking, but smokers. I feel this way particularly after living in a city where, during the last decade, smokers were pushed out of restaurants and then out of bars and music venues and are now in danger of being pushed out of public spaces completely — already being forbidden from smoking in the open air in certain parts of the city (by which I don’t mean, within however many yards of public buildings — I mean, in open air). I’m troubled that this seems to be a personal liberty that no one has any problem curtailing, while smokers are increasingly marginalized as if that’s what they deserve. I can’t help asking myself whose body is next up for social disapprobation and exclusion?

Or maybe it’s that my own experiences tend to put me in the category of feeling that we’re becoming disturbingly moralistic about this issue on the basis of fairly dubious reasoning, and wishing we could all be less so. Who knows?

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[DISCUSSION RULES:

I know this is controversial. I’m extremely ambivalent about leaving comments open because I fear strongly the possibility that a flame will erupt. But I’m also tired of avoiding controversial topics out of fear that readers can’t handle them. I could close comments. But I continue to believe that most readers will be responsible. So I make the following requests.

This post was not meant as the opportunity to argue for an informal referendum on anti-smoking measures; it was conceived simply as my own personal reflection on my reactions to Mr. Armitage as a past or potential smoker and why I feel the way I do. In that light, please assume that I certainly already agree that smoking is bad for your health, that second-hand smoke is also dangerous, and that some people cannot, for reasons of health, take the risk of encountering any tobacco smoke at all. We all agree on these things, as we do that no one should be harmed unnecessarily by the smoking of others. No one, including me, needs to be convinced. Please don’t infer anything about my opinions on the topic that I didn’t state — for instance, I happen to support the ban on smoking in and around public buildings, though that was not the topic here — but ask a question if you really want to know. I may or may not answer, depending on whether I feel it’s germane to the discussion. If you feel yourself tempted to write a sermon or a long personal anecdote on one of these things, please refrain.

Also, and THIS IS PARTICULARLY IMPORTANT TO ME, do not leave a comment that demonizes either smoking or smokers or hints, even vaguely, that smokers are reprehensible people engaged in moral evil or that people who refuse to condemn smoking or smokers are in the same position. My fuse is really short on this issue. If you feel compelled to say that, please take this occasion to be silent about it, because for the purposes of this post that will be considered anathema and the comment will be deleted. The usual rules about ad hominem also apply — do not attack me or any other commentator personally over his or her statements about smoking. I’m not going to be around every minute for the next few days, but I will edit or delete comments that I determine to be troublesome at my own discretion, and if we can’t handle it, I will simply close comments.

Thanks for your understanding.]

~ by Servetus on June 23, 2012.