Armitage leads with the feelings, or: How thick is Richard? A beginning.

***

Warning.

What’s in this post is charged material both for me, and I assume, given things people have said to me, for some parts of the fandom as well.

I’ve mentioned before that I have a “greatest fear” with regard to Richard Armitage, but was unwilling to elaborate. I’ve never talked about it in detail on blog, although I have spoken about it with people in private, and left clues, and wondered how many people guessed. It relates to the nature of Richard Armitage’s intellect, something I ponder a lot, and one of the intentional no-go areas of this blog up till now. Now you know why I don’t respond with enthusiastic affirmations when someone comments about how erudite Armitage is, or why I haven’t queried more closely the regular apparent surprise of reporters that he says intelligent things about his work. (Maybe they are so overwhelmed by his appearance that they don’t believe a beautiful man can say smart things.) But I’ve stayed away from the topic because of my fears.

My greatest fear with regard to Richard Armitage has always been: that he might not be very smart.

Last night, among six other topics that he raised that kept my head spinning and made it literally impossible for me to sleep, I heard him broach the question of his intelligence. He said,

“I do think that I’m a visual actor, like I see things rather than hear them, so, if I read a line, I’ll see an image, I won’t have a cerebral understanding of it. So it means I can be quite stupid as a person, I can be thick, and [tone of voice rises, perhaps as if in amusement? hard to interpret without seeing his face as he said it] still enjoy the process of acting. ‘Cause for me it’s an emotional-physical response rather than anything else.”

I need to respond to that. Not just because it doesn’t square well with a previous statement in which he described himself as having a fast mind. But rather, because I can guess that the impulse in the fandom will be to say, “No, Richard, you are not thick!” Or to conclude that he’s being self-deprecating, as usual.

***

Richard Armitage, interviewed for MTV, December 3, 2012, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Source.

***

Instead, I’m going to agree with him. Emphatically. Not with the statement that he’s thick in a pejorative way. No one can make a judgment of someone’s intelligence based on the kind of evidence accessibly to us — interviews that are like a game of telephone most of the time — I’d have to meet him to evaluate that. But I emphatically agree with the rest of that statement. It coincides with my assessment of him, and why it’s perhaps the most decisive factor in my fandom. What follows is far from everything I have to say about his intelligence, but his comment lent me a visceral need to make a start. And maybe if I start I can talk about this facet in his acting — the question of how he mobilizes the emotional / physical, or, riffing on a remark made by an interlocutor I quote below, how he “leads with his emotions.” This practice — the fact that we almost always guess how his character feels before we know what he thinks or will say — is a huge theme in his acting for me, and, I think, a significant piece of why Mr. Thornton kept me exclusively mesmerized for so long.

Because I know that even saying this will make some people angry, I always thought I would wait till I decided to stop blogging to elaborate on or publish, if then. So good on you, Mr. Armitage, for pushing my feeling button and getting me out of my head. For, as you so often do, helping me abandon my fears. If you can talk about it, I certainly can.

***

Richard Armitage, interviewed on “Marilyn,” December 3, 2012, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

***

To avoid at least some of the negativity that might result from potential misreadings of my position that I’ve encountered before, I want to be understood, unequivocally, on the following points:

• First, please avoid false dilemmas. This blog consistently urges viewers to consider matters outside of dichotomies. People are not either smart or dumb. Armitage’s intellect is quite complex, even if, as my correspondent below implies, he doesn’t “lead with the brain.” Once I can articulate this stuff, once I can get rid of my own issues about intelligence and my struggle with the way people tend to use that trait to describe Mr. Armitage, I can move on to talking about how I view his mind and see it manifested in his acting.
• As a subsidiary point, in case readers are tempted to pair “not cerebral” with “only a pretty face,” I link to my post on why Armitage’s beauty has been so essential to me. I personally can’t separate his body from his talent and his talent from his mind — even if I don’t think of him as a great intellect. And his beauty has awakened me to important things.
• Second, by asking how smart he is (or: how he is smart?), I am not implying that Richard Armitage is stupid. Don’t read the argument that “Richard Armitage is not primarily cerebral” as the affirmation of the potentially most obvious variant of its positive antithesis (“Richard Armitage is dumb”). Whatever he meant by it, Armitage’s remark suggests clearly that that is not the distinction he is drawing. He is saying — my acting is about something else. Indeed, I find it interesting to watch him dealing with the challenges of playing characters whom scripts have required to be not as intellectually quick as he is — Guy of Gisborne (which I’ve discussed a bit before, assessing the extent of Guy’s awareness of what’s going on around him in certain situations) and John Porter are two key examples. Armitage’s statement to Crouse, with its employment of the term “cerebral,” also casts an interesting light on his remark, in the Strike Back DVD extras, on his evaluation of Jodhi May’s contributions to the character of Layla Thompson. Armitage described May as bringing a “cerebral” quality to the character  — the only other time I ever recall him using that word. And yes, I’ve wondered for eons what that evaluation meant to him, what exactly he was saying or implying about May’s performance.
• I hope everyone understands that I am not saying the only way to be smart is to be “cerebral,” or a tangential association that many people make with that term, “book smart.” There are many kinds of smart, just as there are many kinds of dumb. Most humans, including me, have a mixture of these qualities.
• And finally, because this has been implied to me before, in noting that Armitage is not the product of a conventional university education, and noticeably so, I am emphatically not saying that people who lack university degrees also lack intelligence or that people who hold them are intelligent because they have them. I see plenty of evidence to contradict both assertions every day. In what follows, I am not saying “Armitage is uneducated.” The extent of his formal education and its impact on his appearance of intelligence is not what I am addressing here.

***

Harry Kennedy (Richard Armitage) responds in confusion to Gerri’s (Dawn French)apparent about-face about his presence in the village, in Vicar of Dibley: A Handsome Stranger. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

***

And then I have to say this.

***

Dear Mr. Armitage,

I’ve never spoken to you directly on this blog except in jest, or even when I got gooey or sexy, outside of the firm belief that you would never read what I wrote. I’ve never seriously thought you were reading — I’ve always thought you knew more or less what was said, that maybe someone was reading stuff casually on your behalf and passing on amusing bits or general impressions, but that you personally were not reading. A few things you’ve said in the last few days, however, have undermined my unshakable conviction that most of ArmitageWorld was not on your radar. If that’s true, I hate it both for me and for you, but your career is changing, and my own fears about being who I am are abating, too. Panta rhei — it is what it is. Very soon, if you ever did read here or care what bloggers wrote, you will occupy a position where nothing that we say matters hugely anyway, and I take immense comfort in that.

So now, for a change, I speak to you as a reader, not a character in my mind or an actor performing on my screen, and I speak very seriously. If you are using the word “thick” in reference to yourself because of something you read on the Internet, you should keep in mind the source of the information before taking it seriously. I would advise any friend of mine not to peer into sewers for material to provide an accurate self-description.

If you are determined to read this post despite this warning, I hope it will not be painful. I need to write it, however, as it comes the closest I have yet to explaining why you became an addiction.

The fact that you specifically are not a cerebral actor is probably reason number one I became so fascinated with any actor at all. It makes it easier for me to admit this since you’ve broached the topic yourself, but I can’t figure out from what you said and how you said it, whether you were being self-deprecating, or reacting to something you had read or that had been said to you. That awful night when I was looking for something, anything, just to turn my brain off, you were there in the form of Mr. Thornton, and the performance that you gave, in a role I inherently identified with rationally and personally, but where you put Thornton’s feelings in the form of physical reactions in the fore of his politics and rationality, offered me a door into understanding myself so much better. In your performance, I saw the enmeshment of a full personality that could help me understand my own. And here I find myself, approaching three years later. In short, my agreement with you that you don’t usually “lead with the brain” is central to my appreciation of your work.

So I can’t stop to spare your feelings. I remind you that this blog written in the first instance for me, and in the second, for fans of yours and for people who, like me, find themselves willingly or unwillingly on the fandom journey with you and your work as their lodestar. This blog is not — was never — written with you in mind.

Affectionately and best,

Servetus

ps. In case you’re wondering — I’m not worried that you wouldn’t understand this, were you to read it.

pps. That was a joke.

***

Richard Armitage, interviewed by press at Roots Canada, December 3, 2012, Toronto, Ontario. Source.

***

I literally did not sleep a wink last night after listening to Richard Armitage’s interview with Richard Crouse.

As you can guess if you read this blog regularly, Richard Armitage’s remarks in that review pushed a lot of my buttons. Religion, filming in 48 fps, reading experiences, audience enjoyment, Tolkien’s view of his life history, nostalgia, ongoing self-fashioning and telling the story of one’s development and how one sees it: this kind of theme spun through my head all night. Armitage has this amazing quality as a speaker, in replying to the questions of an interviewer, of making us thinking that he’s speaking to us all, and I felt he was speaking to me last night, which is totally, ridiculously crazy. I suppose we could ask if that’s one reason I’m attracted to his work — because what he says relates so directly to what’s happening to me, to questions I have.

In this post, I address one aspect of the interview — the decisive matter of his remark about his perception that his acting is based on visualization of words, and the way this process affects his body and emotions. I am not a fan of Richard Armitage because I think he’s particularly smart. I’m a fan of Richard Armitage because of the emotional.

***John Porter (Richard Armitage) responds to the news of his wife’s death in Strike Back 1.4. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

***

Although it may come as a surprise to some readers given my enumerations of my sexual fantasies, I’ve suffered under few illusions about the potential attractiveness of Richard Armitage as a real life romantic partner. The real Servetus and the real Armitage have lots in common in terms of the human condition, I’ve thought, but little in common in terms of the sorts of things that make a relationship work. I don’t care to go skiing, my career as a recreational dancer was abbreviated; I don’t read him as particularly religious in a way that meshes well with my piety. I suspect there would be a serious conflict in the ways that he and I have, respectively, of being serious. I like food a lot, but I struggle to let my sense of humor be sunny as opposed to ironic, and I am not especially naughty.

The best evidence for my conclusion, however, is probably that Mr. Armitage is nothing like the men with whom I’ve had the three most serious relationships of my life — a comparative linguist in college, a theoretical physicist during my doctoral coursework, and a historian / fellow scholar in the same field of inquiry after I was ABD. I have a thing for really, really brainy men. The more cerebral, the more widely read, the better. As a pragmatist, I also am aware that relationships between people of widely differing educational levels carry their own particular kinds of tensions, especially when the woman has the more advanced education. Laying aside the question of whether I’m smart, I’m unquestionably extremely well educated. I’ve a way better vocabulary than the average human, I relish using it to the full, and it’s often my tongue that gets me in trouble. Affairs with men who were attracted to me physically first haven’t lasted. I’ve been broken up with at least once because the guy in question felt that I was not only smarter than him, I made him look stupid in front of his friends. I need a romantic partner who is not only not afraid of smart women, but positively attracted to them. I need a meeting of the minds.

***

The immense weariness or sadness of Heinz Kruger (Richard Armitage), just before blows up the lab, in Captain America: The First Avenger. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

***

I was aware that apart from some fantasy with no tangible relationship to reality, I would never have gotten that with the real Richard Armitage, were I even in his flight path and likely to be encountered. It’s not that I thought he was dumb, but my perception of him, based on extensive reading of the information available about him, always suggested to me that he had the kind of mind that was curious and open, interested in the pregnant detail that draws everything together, but not narrowly focused and certainly not on things that he didn’t see as relevant or interesting. Even with my best efforts I’ve never been able to make myself imagine having a complex theological discussion with him, and that’s something I live for — and I can do it with Pesky every week. I don’t think Armitage’s mind works in that acute way. He doesn’t seem to be an intellectual hairsplitter. I am one. But I loved him anyway. So while it bothered me, I gave him a pass on things that are actually important to me (and was then charged with being too perfectionist). Many of the things he says about history, for example, are problematic, and he’s said a few things about his historical derivation of the Thorin character that grate on me. This is hardly surprising; I’m a professional and he’s looking for that perfect detail that’s going to give him the entry into the character, as his remarks on his research for the role of Heinz Kruger suggested. What he does has its place. It gives him what he needs to turn in a great performance, and just as importantly, it interests him, which justifies thinking that way without reference to any other goal. Nothing wrong with any of this — it just doesn’t make him into a great mind.

I’ve been asked occasionally if I don’t fantasize, in my role as professor, about having Armitage as a student. I never have. People who said to me, I bet he was fun to teach, always made think something I couldn’t say — I bet he was quick and engaging to teach when he was interested in what he was learning. I bet he tuned out when he was bored or didn’t see the point, and I bet he is really good at appearing attentive while thinking his own thoughts. It’s not that I think he was rude or disobedient with his instructors; on the contrary. He just strikes me as someone who puts his energies into the things that intrigue and inspire him and pushes other things aside, doing enough to please or satisfy rather than seeking to excel in every single venture. In school, especially by a teacher who wanted him to concentrate, this stance might have been termed lazy and unfocused; for an artist, we might call it inspirational motivation, or maintaining the mental space necessary to give one’s all in the decisive areas. It doesn’t mean that I think he is undisciplined — just that I think he has perhaps an unusually good idea of where his intellectual energies need to go, and prefers to apply them in those places rather than in the omnivorous way that that the cerebral intellect processes the world around it.

***Guy of Gisborne’s inevitably obsessive love — Guy (Richard Armitage) proposes rather forcefully to Marian in Robin Hood 1.7. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

***

Thinking that Armitage is not an intense mind, moreover, has never prevented me from observing that he has said some incredibly perceptive or insightful — and above all, moving — things. These have tended, for me however, to follow the line of psychological or aesthetic intelligence. I’ve always found stunning what he said about Guy’s capacity to love, for instance, in the BBCA interview of June, 2008:

Similarly, I liked his point, in the audio version of the interview he did in the Sunday Express for Strike Back, about the effect that watching black screen in the place of commercials at the Strike Black premiere had on his perception of the work, his observation about how this was like the pause between moments of a symphony, and how he thought he might use it someday when he is a filmmaker. And, of course, from very early on in his career, he’s said insightful things about his characters, as in his remarks about John Standring from the Sparkhouse press pack (2002):

[John] has an affection for [Carol] which I feel was based on a need for nurturing rather than on a sexual need. He is very protective of her because of the lack of love she has from her mother and the way her father treats her. But there is a simplicity to John; he doesn’t always understand all the nuances of what is going on around him. In some ways he is like an old man on the outside, but there is a real naivety [!] about him.

I’m sure that each of us could come up with some statement that he’s made that has seemed right on point, or smart.

***

John Standring (Richard Armitage) agrees to marry Carol Bolton (Sarah Smart) in order to save her tenancy in episode 3 of Sparkhouse. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

***

Richard Armitage may have individual areas of which he has a strong structural command; the mythic structure of drama could be one of these (and it’s something I’ve wanted to write about more) — but if so, it would be unconscious rather than explicit. He seems fascinated in a productive way with the metaphorical quality of recurring motifs, like “the quest,” a term that’s been mentioned in almost every interview related to The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey that I’ve read recently, and that speaks very much to my own situation. I can imagine I’ll want to comment on what he’s said about that once I’ve seen the film(s). But I haven’t ever heard a consistent discussion from him that suggested to me that he has a great analytical intellect. I loved what he said about the historical basis of The Impressionists because of his personality and ethics, not because I thought it was wildly insightful, or made me understand Monet any differently.

While I was aware of this matter, I didn’t think about it much. It’s not like I’m going to get to go out with him or we’ll ever have an occasion to speak about the relative virtues of medieval altarpieces or historiographies of Weimar macroeconomics or even whether if a tree falls in the one and no one hears it, does it make a sound.

From the beginning — I was in this for the way watching Richard Armitage made me feel. And the way that, in turn, my feelings opened up my own understanding of my life.

***Harry Kennedy (Richard Armitage) responds to Gerri (Dawn French)’s statement that he’s the only person who was ever interested in her as a permanent partner, in Vicar of Dibley: A Vicar in White. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

***

My surrender to Armitagemania was so sudden and complete that I spent no time at all pondering the comparative aspects of the question. There just wasn’t any other actor for me. It was, to paraphrase Gerri’s remark to Harry Kennedy on the eve of their wedding in The Vicar of Dibley, “just you,” Mr. Armitage. I have had commentators note that my admiration was too unbounded and intense to take seriously unless I also considered whether Armitage was a better actor than others of his generation. I always admitted the analytical significance of the question and then threw it aside as uninteresting to me. This blog was not going to be a place like my research, where I examined every moment of a question, no matter how boring or distasteful to me. Other actors may be better, I’d say, but I’m not interested in them, so let other people ask those questions.

And then, this year, someone fell across my path that stymied me a bit. It was during that phase in the late spring when everyone was getting tired of so little information about Armitage — though I wasn’t frustrated, lots of people were. People started to peel off, and one of the major destinations was the Tom Hiddleston fandom.

[Right: Tom Hiddleston, April 2012, about the time I started hearing about him. Source.]

I had no idea who Hiddleston was, but then one night in chat, someone sent me a link to an interview with him that I finally watched, under pressure from my peers and seeing that, in the absence of new information to chew over, the chatroom was going to stop being all Richard Armitage all the time. Sifting through youtube playlists, I can’t for the life of me remember the video, now, but I remember thinking, “Wow, that guy is smart.” I looked up his wikipedia entry. He has a double-first in Classics from Cambridge University, where he studied at Pembroke College. I admit that this is the kind of detail that impresses me, because I know what it means — it’s the highest possible examination result in one of the most difficult humanities topics at one of the most demanding universities on the planet via a place at one of the most selective colleges. This subject requires two languages at least and oodles of reading and a way of speaking and perceiving that few people on the planet are gifted with. It is traditionally the province of brilliant people who don’t need to earn their own livings. As talented as he may be, Hiddleston had all the advantages, of course. He is from a completely different class background than Armitage, and though he would deny it (who doesn’t need to believe in the meritocracy and that he has earned what he has gotten?), that background — one that sends you to the Dragon School in Oxford and then to Eton — is the kind of opportunity that makes a huge difference in the life of anyone, but especially in the life of the very gifted child, who doesn’t dissipate his energy in struggle or miss the boat while waiting, bored, for his peers to catch up. Great instruction makes a difference. Things were laid in Hiddleston’s cradle that Armitage had to work unbelievably hard for. But they work in the same profession. They compete for the same kind of work. And when they’re both auditioning for Henry V, no one gives Armitage a pass just because he was born in a middle class family in Leicester and not to a wealthy family in Westminster.

So I saw this interview with Hiddleston that made me think, “Oh!” And I started to ask myself about Richard Armitage. The questions I asked were never serious enough to cause a defection. Hiddleston’s appearances suggest that he has the kind of intellect that becomes a professor and the kind of mercurial internal energy that tends to make a good professor into a rock-star public intellectual. Hiddleston is the type of guy — or perhaps an extreme version — of the person (there are women like this, too, and I am a bit like this) with whom I spend most of my working days. If I wanted to crush on a Hiddleston type, there are enough of them around me, even they are perhaps not so cute. Richard Armitage, I’m sorry to say, or maybe I’m not, does not exude a professorial aura, though I have a scriptwriting friend who loves the thought of him as a professor in love and wants to cast him in such a role, with the necessary modification of “absent-minded.”

***

I didn’t crush on Hiddleston. But I was troubled by even that moment of doubt. I had to talk about it with someone. I have a handful of interlocutors about Armitage who prefer to leave their comments off blog, and the topic came up with one of them, a woman I’ll call “Otherfan,” who also has an advanced academic degree and works in an academic profession.

To illustrate how I dealt with the question of my Hiddleston attraction, I append — with Otherfan’s permission — excerpts from some exchanges from last summer. These have been shortened but the content has not been changed. And yes, I realize parts of this conversation could be brutal to read.

***

Otherfan to Servetus, May 17, 2012

If I were a genius film director, I would commit the Lymond Chronicles to screen. IMO Tom Hiddleston would be a credible Lymond, with Richard Armitage as Jerrott Blythe, the Knight of St. John whose feelings toward Lymond are at the far edge of bromance. See? Two great tastes that taste great together. Those two can both brood like champs while swashbuckling their way across sixteenth-century Europe, and RA can court fan insanity with a ridiculously masculine yet orientation-bending role. […] What do you think, is it a moneymaker? 🙂

[…]

Servetus to Otherfan, May 17, 2012

Wow, then we could have them both! And homoerotic elements!!!! I’d pay to see it. I don’t know the story, though it’s gotta be better than 50 Shades.

Speaking of Hiddleston: I was seriously daunted last night. Hiddleston has a double first from Cambridge. In Classics, yet. […] My secret fear about Armitage is that he’s not very smart — a sort of idiot savant who’s not very interesting except when he’s working. But that might also be a description of me, it occurred to me last night. Scary.

[…]

Otherfan to Servetus, May 18, 2012

[…]

Double first: Sometimes very smart people are terrible actors because they’re too much in their heads, but that doesn’t seem to apply in this case. TH can go from vulnerable to furious to wicked in approximately zero seconds. ::love:: As for RA, I don’t know if I’d describe him as “not very smart,” but I know what you mean, and I can get why you’re reluctant to air it on your blog. It sounds disloyal, and a little unkind. Before he learned how to interview like a movie star, RA sometimes gave the impression of being rather dull, though I couldn’t say whether this reflects on his actual intelligence or not. His early interviews remind me of some of the engineers I know (and I know quite a few): lively and articulate in his own domain, but otherwise a little socially impaired.

I didn’t answer this message. My mother was diagnosed with cancer again. I fell dreadfully behind on correspondence. Otherfan was kind enough to write again to inquire what was up.

Otherfan to Servetus, June 24, 2012

I finally got with the program and watched Sherlock. Why am I always the last to know about these things? Did you watch it? If so, what was your opinion? For my part, I loved it. The storytelling can be a bit hit and miss, but the look of it is fantastic and the Holmes / Watson chemistry is dynamite. I had never seen Martin Freeman before, apart from the Hobbit trailers. Perhaps for that reason I thought of him as irritatingly pert and chipper, but he actually has a nice everyman gravity as Watson that I think will carry over to The Hobbit. I’m much less apprehensive about it than I was. And as far as I’m concerned Benedict Cumberbatch can be in every movie for the rest of my life. (I’m still not seeing the one about the cavalry horse, though.) Spectrally pale beanpoles with ridiculous names are my thing, apparently. This is good news for my husband.

[…]

Servetus to Otherfan, June 24, 2012

Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written. […] The latest news is that my mother’s cancer has recurred […]

I just got the series 1 Sherlock DVDs from the library this week. Obviously I’ve been hearing about it forever because of the heavy intersection between Armitage and Freeman / Cumberbatch fans. […] However, I have to finish watching series 10 of Spooks tonight b/c the DVDs are due tomorrow [I put that review here].

One thing I really appreciate about Freeman … is how funny he can be with fans. Every now and then you see a vid of him just thanking his fans for odd things, and it’s always a combination of thankful, funny, and ironic. Huh. Maybe I should post on this. I wonder if an anxious actor attracts anxious fans — or if anxious fans create an anxious actor?

[…]

Otherfan to Servetus, June 25, 2012

I’m sorry to hear your mother’s health situation is so serious.

[…]

I’ll be curious to hear your opinion of Sherlock. […] The principals were so well cast, it has made me think back to your “idiot savant” comment from a few emails back and wonder if there are characteristics so innate that they’re impervious to craft. For example, Sherlock Holmes. He can’t be just an assortment of twitchy mannerisms, he also has to have a believably analytical mind. If a character requires that, do you need an essentially cerebral actor for the role? Could a gifted but not especially bright actor convincingly replicate that quality? Tom Hiddleston once remarked that he couldn’t turn off his intelligence. The press pilloried him for being an ass, but I think he’s getting at something real. It’s not difficult to recognize people who lead with their brains, but there’s no particular behavior that identifies them. It’s more like a certain intensity of attention, a way of consuming and processing information. I’m not sure I have ever seen this quality effectively suppressed by someone who has it, nor imitated by someone who doesn’t. For this reason I doubt Richard Armitage would be any more credible as a mastermind than Hiddleston would be as a mindless thug, and it’s not really anything to do with skill. I hope I’m not betraying the fandom to say this. There are many kinds of intelligence, but some of them make more sense to me than others.

[…]

Servetus to Otherfan, June 26, 2012

[…] Two things quickly —

1) your para about intelligence was really helpful — maybe thinking about it this was is a way that I can bring myself to write about the topic, which is important to me. I completely agree with Hiddleston’s comment […] You can’t be around me for very long, for instance, and not realize that I’m cerebral, sometimes even if I don’t say anything at all. It’s a vibe. It’s something that we look for in doctoral students, incidentally, as it seems to be a primary predictor of success in hiring situations, both as professors can smell it on each other, and also because we can’t really teach it, or only very rarely. And Armitage doesn’t give it off. At all. In any case, after reading what you said a lot of things about my Armitage attraction became a lot clearer to me and even if I can’t write about them I’m grateful to you for lending me the insight. This was really spectacular.

2) watched the first Sherlock episode last night and talk about pitch perfect. I can see why people are raving about this series. The script, the edginess of camera usage, the speed with which lines are delivered, the graphics, everything. Martin Freeman is going to be a fantastic Bilbo Baggins. Cumberbatch mostly seems just strange to me — but I have two more episodes to watch […] To demonstrate your point — I’ve never seen Freeman in anything, but based on this he seems like someone I’d have as a colleague or talk to; his way of relating to the world seems fundamentally similar to mine. I can’t imagine having a devastating crush on him like I have on Armitage, though, and I don’t think it’s because he’s short and cute as opposed to tall and handsome. There’s an underlying vibe there.

Anyway, gotta go — it’s time for grocery shopping. Talk to you soon, I hope. Thanks for your good wishes, we need them.

The correspondence above is incorporated with the permission of Otherfan, who, when I asked her to reread it and consent to its publication here, added the following comment on the conversation:

Otherfan to Servetus, December 4, 2012:

Lest we sound too much like a couple of mean girls, I do want to stress that there is a big difference in my mind between “not cerebral” and “unintelligent.” I wouldn’t presume to make a pronouncement about the intellect of someone I have never met. In the case of Richard Armitage, my opinion is based on interviews I have read or seen and the roles toward which he gravitates, which have certainly evolved over time but which collectively suggest an actor who is knowledgeable and skilled in matters of his craft and naturally charismatic in-role but not, for lack of a better term, particularly “brainy.”

***

This is already 6,000 words long, and I have to grade. There’ll be more on this as soon as I can post it. Why can’t I write faster?

***

I realize by leaving this at this point, I’m leaving those who disagree with my argument at the rawest possible place. It’s okay. Let me know how you feel about this. I will talk about what these conclusions mean to me, and to my analysis of Armitage, as soon as possible.

~ by Servetus on December 5, 2012.