Taking stock of where I am, Armitagically — Artimagically?

A sincere request:

If you have not already, please join the campaign to congratulate (“giftbomb”) Mr. Armitage on his performance in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and help out people who need our assistance in the bargain, by leaving a small donation with JustGiving or spReAdthelove. We’ll be ending these requests after the London premiere, so please join us now!

Thanks to all who have already given!

Today I’m praying for the people of Japan, hit by another earthquake and tsunami, and the victims of the typhoon in the Philippines. Please pray for their safety and consolation, for the emotional relief of those who mourn and those who aid the victims, and please help them in other ways as you can and are led.

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My head is really spinning still. Too much going on, stuff colliding in every sphere of my life. I wish I could figure out how to vent my mind and emotions but I’m not going to get that right now. It is what it is. So this post is going to be random, with some hookups to other stuff, but indubitably running over some of the same territory. I’m just trying to sort out some thoughts.

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First, some easy stuff. If you haven’t read it, check out Zan’s account of her trip to the taping of Anderson Cooper Live this week. I’d have reblogged this except that for some reason, the first post didn’t push to me and I missed it. Part One and Part Two. Can’t wait to find out what the question was.

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Richard Armitage, Ziegfield Theater, NYC premiere of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, December 6, 2012. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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Judiang comments on the suit and is not sure what she thinks. I may have more to say later, but my response right now is that while I might not have picked this — I nonetheless welcome it — and it’s an unusually consciously daring choice for him. I liked it. First, I’ve always wondered what he would like in a trouser with practically no break and here it is, perfectly cut. The contrasting boot color, while it calls unnecessary attention to the bottom of the hem, is useful because it really lets me ponder the extent to which the size of his feet complicate the problem of balancing his silhouette and giving his legs all the length they have. Second, I love the buildup of layers over his chest. It says warmth, stability, and strength at the same time it says, here are layers, peel them off one by one. (And we don’t see the inevitable pull across his chest that we’ve seen every picture where he hasn’t been wearing a specially tailored shirt. It might be there but layers cover it.) Third, it really screams, “English!!!!!” — the cloth, the cut, the combination with the boots. Love those slanting pockets on the jacket as a style feature; makes me think of the hunt. It’s beautifully made, this piece, with its structural elements beautifully resolved. He looked different from everyone else in the group photos, and not in a bad way.

Finally, however, and most importantly, this outfit — whatever you think of its merits as an individual choice for him: should he really resolve the waist button question in this way? Does the breadth of the trouser across his rear provide an unpleasant emphasis on that musculature? — confirms an impression I’ve had all along, since we saw in the Zegna suit on the red carpet in Wellington, which is that he’s finally effectively resolving the elements and questions of style and then standing up for his conclusions. No suit of any cut is going to be perfect on his beautiful body — so what things will he prioritize, which will he decide leave behind? This is a perfect execution of a potentially counter-intuitive style choice — as opposed to an acceptable style choice that’s somehow gone awry, which is what we’ve seen more often in his red carpet experiences. I hope this distinction makes sense to readers — it’s not that it’s the most gorgeous suit for him, but rather that, given his apparent desire to go conservative traditional classic English, he wears it so correctly, beautifully, and confidently. That’s what makes it a daring choice — not the fact that isn’t the first choice one might make, but rather that, having made it, he stands so well behind it.

It also makes me wonder rather aggressively what he’d look in some of the other traditional twentieth-century British men’s suit styles.

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A toy representation of himself he doesn’t dislike? Richard Armitage and his Thorin Lego figure, on the day that principal photography for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey ended, Wellington, New Zeland. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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Harder: I was saying some time ago that it wasn’t the merchandise that was bugging me, although the manufacture of nostalgia was getting troublingly aggressive. I wanted to write a separate post about this question, and now there may not be time before the moment has passed. The thing that was really bugging me was the way that the trailers and TV spots were gradually building a particular story, but not in a linear fashion. The trailers were putting together a narrative, but I was getting confused by a story that I couldn’t see easily because it came in out of order snippets. I think I stopped at TV spot 8, though I keep downloading stuff, thinking I may watch it later. This impression has been enhanced since Armitage’s been on these talkshows. It seems like each of them includes a clip from the film, and I have to turn away not to see stuff I don’t want to see.

I had thought of avoiding spoilers in a much more limited fashion before this — simply of preventing myself from seeing them so I didn’t know how something ended, and thus ruin the enjoyment of it. Since I’d already read The Hobbit, I wasn’t worried about spoilers, but I started worrying about how the trailers for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey were already constructing a version of the movie for me. The marketing is trying to control my impression of the film before I even see it, to develop certain kinds of emotions in me that will condition my viewing of it, by means of a non-linear narrative that emphasizes particular themes — even as I try to protect the vulnerability of my emotions to the art that I’m about to witness, to preserve space for the development of the narrative.

Luckily, it’s only a few more days.

Speaking of spoilers — something in my FB feed had a scene from the third film to watch. For crying out loud. I didn’t watch it, but I’m struggling with how I’m going to regulate my information processing if potentially everything I look at related to Armitage for the next year and a half could possibly reflect the problem articulated above.

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Something that he’s been doing for eons, but that we’re only seeing now: Richard Armitage signs photographs. NYC, about now? Just popped up on Richard Armitage.

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Hardest, but inchoate: Thanks to everyone who commented last night. I want, I think, to add one more observation to that post. Just in case you’re tempted to think I’m criticizing the fans who were there last night: I’m not. Even were I not myself hugely interested in what was happening there, and curious to see it, I would never tell people not to do something that’s completely legal and entirely harmless. But I think it was the vid more than anything that triggered my reaction.

That video gave me to think. I think part of my silence was responding to this sudden realization: “So, this is how it could be now.” Not so much the changed Armitage for public appearances — we’ve known for awhile that that was coming, and, I would argue, no matter how we react to it personally, it is necessary for his career. (And it’s not happening just now — it’s been happening over the last several months. We’re just seeing it now.) It’s rather the noise of shutters falling and the sight of flashes going off and people calling, “Richard, Richard, Richard!” It’s not Armitage that’s bugging me, but (for lack of a better word) the circus that has suddenly bloomed up around him.

This is a consequence of doing his business. If he wants to be a high profile artist, this is a price he will pay. It has no practical consequences for me. I wasn’t at the red carpet and have no plans to attend one. What I’ve seen of the ones around this film doesn’t make them one whit more attractive to me as an experience than they were before. But it’s just a really different world, a really different frame, than the one in which I’m used to seeing and thinking about him. He will be in places where we can anticipate him. We will prepare in order to try to fulfill our dreams of a glance, an autograph, a remark, a hug. People will be in place to move him forward and away from us. Lights will flash and the noise will be heavy. He will be a celebrity.

Here’s another index of this same thing:

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Richard Armitage, photographed leaving NBC Studios, Rockefeller Plaza, New York City, December 5, 2012. Source: Getty Images.

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This is one of my favorite pictures among those I’ve seen recently, but / and it’s clearly a paparazzo image. Someone was lying in wait — perhaps not for him — but certainly to catch wind of celebrities leaving the studio. We haven’t really had these available before. It’s new. I feel a bit guilty for liking this picture so well. The sheepish grin and crinkles and look right into the lens appeal. The flip side of the sheepish grin, one suspects, a certain amount of gritting of teeth behind the smile that we can also read in his expression. I like sheepish and am willing to take annoyed with it as the cost of the opportunity to see this picture.

I know this is a progressive step in the objectification of Richard Armitage as a thing for sale, a process I am inclined to think of negatively. He is also a thing I buy, am eager to buy. These things are contradictory and yet true.

Mr. Armitage has long had a sense of humor and a feel for the absurd, as his interviews have revealed, but I think he is going to have to develop a greater level of irony than he has ever displayed publicly in the past (with, perhaps, the exception of the Spooks 7 “in Russia” excerpt). I am, too.

I love all the pictures and attention and energy! It makes me sad, a little. These things are contradictory, and yet true.

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Mr. Armitage, you’ve done so well, so far, and there’s only one really big ticket appearance left on the calendar that I know about. You must be going back to the UK for it, soon. I hope you’ve at least enjoyed it a little, or not hated it too much, but you’ve looked great and knocked our socks off.

This is my favorite long haul flight song. I hope you are “home and dry,” yourself, very soon.

~ by Servetus on December 7, 2012.