Richard Armitage: Two pictures, two fantasies. Fantasy 1

This is an attempt at something I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since I read this post in December 2011 and had a visceral reaction I couldn’t explain. Frenz removed one picture from her original post, but the basic features of my reaction still hold, I think. I couldn’t write about it back then out of a combination of emotional overwhelmedness, other things going on, and of course the premiere of The Hobbit trailer (December 2011 was a big month in Armitageworld), but maybe I’ll try it now.

Caveat: this musing intends only to describe my reaction(s) to these photos. Your mileage may vary and I stress that you are entitled to your own reaction(s).

[The other matter is that I usually don’t post candid or personal photos here that I don’t have rights to, although I respect the rights of other bloggers to do as they see best. (Explaining why I usually don’t and link instead would involve a lot of words that probably no one wants to read, and I have not been entirely consistent in self-enforcement of this rule, either, but I’ll say that I’m making an exception this time because I’m writing about what the images mean to me (as opposed to just referring to them) and because I think potentially the post is not easily comprehensible without them, and pictures or videos I’ve simply linked to before have been removed from their original locations. If you own either image and wish the picture removed, don’t hesitate to contact me via the form at right.]

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The photo above was posted by Andrew Whiteoak on Twitter with the caption: “found an old Polaroid of Richard Armitage looking very youthful.”

Andrew Whiteoak is a wigmaker and makeup and prosthetic artist of nineteen years experience who has worked extensively with the Birmingham Rep. He lists his productions here, and refers to both productions there that we associate Armitage with: Hamlet (1998) and The Four Alice Bakers (1999), so this picture may date from that period. (Whiteoak also lists involvement on Frozen (1998), but I’m concluding that this production was something other than the 2005 film with Armitage in a supporting role, both because according to the film credits, the script for Frozen was workshopped after that, Whiteoak’s name does not appear in those credits, and also because imdb.com does not list Whiteoak on its roster of Frozen crew [although Whiteoak admittedly does not appear to have an imdb entry].)

The picture itself is fairly consistent with Armitage’s appearance as “smug man” in This Year’s Love (released in 1999), so it’s plausible to associate it with the period immediately after Armitage left LAMDA.

At right: Richard Armitage in This Year’s Love. Source: Richard Armitage Central Main Gallery.

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Beyond offering that relatively uncontroversial historical contextualizing information, it’s not my intent to say anything much about Richard Armitage’s mood itself in the photo. I don’t think we can. We don’t know all that much about what the original purpose of the photo was. Polaroids were typically used to take photos for immediate use in some context, where the quality of the image was less important than having the rough image of what it reproduced quickly. (I remember a college professor of mine taking Polaroids of us on the first day, as he said, in order to work on learning our names. Now a computer program gives me the same information, based on student ID pictures.) Given its origin it might have been used to capture an image of Armitage that could be used for initial makeup / costuming planning. Polaroids were also “fun” images — people took them to be spontaneous or to remember particular moments and have the photos to share immediately. So it could have been made by someone who was a friend or becoming one to capture a funny or memorable moment. Or, or, or, or.

Additionally, we don’t know all that much about what Richard Armitage was like as a person at the time. What someone elsewhere called Armitage’s “Mona Lisa expression” here makes it really hard to say much about that, as does his reserve, which is the main vibe I derive from this photo. One person’s shy is another person’s aloof, and as so often, he seems shielded or enigmatic here. This expression could be one of confidence, arrogance, fatigue, happiness, amusement, triumph … there are a lot of ways to read this particular frame, if I’m trying to learn something about Richard Armitage, a lot of ways I could (mis)interpret, based on my needs.

But yeah. Ahem. Wow.

I had the same reaction I had as when I saw the candid picture of Richard Armitage from the era of 42nd Street (ca. 1990-1): as if I had been kicked in the stomach. That feeling was hard to take — it reproduced way too exactly my reactions from the beginning of Armitagemania — and when I had it, as I have several times over the years, I thought to myself, “You can’t take this. You have to get off Armitage. You have to stop blogging.”

Now, for those who weren’t around yet (I can’t believe I’m writing stuff like that now), December 2011 was a big month in Armitageworld. And for me: on the day I saw that photo, I had just drive a very long distance, for the Chanukkah / Christmas conjuncture, and switched frames from work to home. But in Armitageworld, the appearance of those pictures occurred shortly after Jonia broke the photos from Use Me as Your Cardigan (2002), so more youngish Armitage, which also had hit me very hard for several days. And just a little after this, we were to see the first trailer for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and #richardarmitage trended on Twitter for the first time.

The picture above hit me just as hard this week. And while I didn’t think, “I’ve got to stop this” this week (I think I’ve finally resolved that question in my mind — though my emotions move at such a glacial pace that it took years), I had the same reaction.

This photo joins a sequence of data for me, beginning with the 1990-91 photo, with the dorktastic dance video, to which my reaction was also immediate and highly emotional, and the apparent glimpses of him in the Sarah Brightman “Captain Nemo” vid and in the Cats rehearsal vids. Young Armitage. Returned from Budapest with Equity card, slogging it out over his first professional steps in London. Jubilant and joking with excited friends and coworkers after a presentation. Being silly in low stakes situations, concentrating and working hard in high stakes ones. Happy at a party, face flushed as if he’s had just a drink and is cheerily muzzy on New Year’s Eve. Getting more serious, realizing he needs drama school to get better roles. Soberly saving money for that, auditioning, getting in, honing his skills.

Then this photo. Who is he here? Given the considerations above, let’s make Richard Armitage 27 or 28 in this photo. I want to think — this is Richard Armitage upon finishing up, looking eagerly for work to get his feet even wetter. Doing whatever he can. Small films, tiny extra role in a big film, stage roles at the Birmingham Rep. Auditioning for Darren Denison. The future looks bright; he’s got solid representation; his reach may occasionally exceed his grasp, but his sober self-estimation and a reserve and a not-always-calculable capacity to audition successfully are balanced out or trumped by the intensity of his daydreams and ambitions and artistic aspirations. In this picture, in my mind, he’s standing backstage or in the hall of an annex, he’s been hired. He thinks he can do it this time. He will concentrate (see pic) and if he just works hard, the small roles he’s getting now will gradually turn into bigger ones. He doesn’t need to preen or posture — he just needs to keep at it, get experience. He’s the man for the job, he can do it. And a year or so later, he’ll join the Royal Shakespeare Company as a beginner.

My emotional addition to those data: Armitage is a basically happy young man, ambitious, but also eager to see the city and taste everything in it after growing up in the provinces, eager to learn, eager to try new things. He loves to dance, he likes to club. He likes the Depeche Mode and The Smiths stuff from his school years, but he’s also eager to dance to the increasingly edgy 90s dance music in London. He loves the euphoria and feels a certain kind of inner adventurousness that frees him from the mundane moments of his life — making his rent, driving a clunker, unpleasant odd jobs — and London is a great canvas against which to do this, as is the provincial stage in Birmingham, or the Edinburgh Fringe. I imagine him rocketing from place to place in his spare time to do a role, not ever quite getting enough sleep but still standing up every morning with the indefatigable vigor of the twenty-something who thinks he’ll always be able to do it — his body and his spirit and his optimism will hold him and it will all work out and somehow it will all be more than enough.

A great fantasy — but what it brings me initially is always visceral feelings of loss of breath, nausea. Why? If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time, you might be able to guess, since I’ve moved to the position that fandom is really a fantasy of self and so fantasies about the object of the crush reflect shielded moments of self-recognition that we might excavate if we had the courage to look at them closely.

Think for a second about what you were doing at that age (mutatis mutandis — I was 27 two years before Armitage was). I know what I was doing.

Always the studious type, I’d completed a double bachelors in four years, then moved on immediately to graduate school, where I’d submitted a 120 pp. thesis and gotten my MA right on time and taken my comprehensive exams on schedule as well and passed “with distinction.” I’d won my first international fellowship when I was 26, broken up painfully and violently with The Physicist, and moved to Germany, where I met a whole new crowd of people, including ex-SO and the people from the synagogue as well. I was riding a bike every day for the first time since I was eight. I was going without speaking English for entire fortnights or longer, and immersed in the middle of my dissertation research. My Latin was getting better. I was seeing things for the very first time. At 28, the fellowship had been renewed and I was continuing the research and starting to write the dissertation.

I felt like I was alive like I’d never been before with the exception of the time I spent studying in México. Exhilarating years in many ways. I thought on some level: I can have it all. I can be a great academic and a great writer, I can fall in love and marry and have children and work a lot and love and play a lot and my identity struggles will work out okay and I can be a Jew in a Christian family and cook like a gourmet chef and learn seven more languages and read all these hundreds of books that are waiting out there to be read. I can learn to speak German perfectly, so that no one will be able to tell I’m not a native speaker. I can jet back and forth between all these settings and never really lose track of who I am in any of them. I will find a job, the right job, and I will be great at it. My research will always fascinate me. I will always love. And no, I’m not getting enough sleep, but my body will hold up and it will allow me to sustain this level of adventurousness and my energy will never subside and I’ll always be this curious.

What’s uncomfortable about it: the way the pictures remind me, as a woman on the lip of middle age, of all the possibilities that are out there. That are maybe still out there. That I can maybe still remember to believe in. If I can take the risks, if I can recover, even as an older, wiser, sadder person, that late twenty-something joie de vivre that is both enthusiastic and beginning to be mature.

Those years for me were also poor years, painful years, hard years, struggling years. But above all: years of an all-sustaining hope. That’s what I see when I see these pictures, I think. What kicks me in the stomach is the sudden reminder of the longing I feel for that kind of unburdened relationship with the universe and fate.

~ by Servetus on April 21, 2013.