Armitage takes Australia: Goodbye to “precious” Richard?

[I realize this is likely to be controversial. Keep in mind — my interpretation, my opinion. Your mileage may vary. A reminder to us all “to be kind.”]

I owe the expression “precious Armitage” to Jazzbaby1 and Jas Rangoon.

Regarding my view of tropes in understanding and explaining Richard Armitage, see here. I simply insert the term below without explanation.

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[Left: Richard Armitage as photographed in Sydney by Tracey Nearmy, end of April, 2013. The photo’s still eye-popping, even after days of looking at it. Source.]

I can’t help but think we’re getting spoiled by Richard Armitage’s increasing visibility when we start wondering about his whereabouts after only a month and a half. (No doubt everyone will be very relieved to know, once filming resumes in Wellington, exactly where he is for ten weeks.) Armitage had been seen in London the first week of March, 2013, for the DVD release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. After the initial burst of news and pictures, segments of material recorded that week trickled out in subsequent weeks. A candid photo of Armitage was tweeted from Todd Snyder’s studio on April 17, but he remained (to my knowledge) unsighted apart from that. So his scheduled appearance in Sydney on April 29-May 1, 2013 offered Armitage fans a welcome “Richard recharge.”

Most felicitously, from my perspective, Sydney gave us Richard Armitage by himself, not as one of a group of Hobbit headliners. I wasn’t forced to give time to people who are not my crush in order to enjoy the pleasures of an at best limited Armitage uptake. In contrast to London, which meant frustrating bits and pieces over time, Sydney was Richard Armitage straight, uncut with James Nesbit. Sydney gave me Richard Armitage, pure and delicious.

[Right: From the same photoshoot as above. See Guylty’s response here. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

Since Armitage is not the main attraction for all of the film’s fans, I admit to curiosity about planned staffing for these promotional photo ops. What’s the rationale behind a solo appearance (besides marketing)? Are other actors from the film doing these promotional events (in Armitage’s case, Toronto as well) by themselves as well? Is this a sign that the marketing people think Armitage is enough of a draw by himself that he doesn’t need to appear in a group? Was it a Richard Armitage who’s admitted the exhausting qualities of publicity practicing the media ropes course all by himself in a relatively friendly place? Was it, as some fans have speculated, a kind gesture toward Australian fans, who did not get a glimpse of him at a gala premiere event? An attempt to make The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey a stronger sale to “serious” film fans via the Popcorn Taxi venue and thus strengthen Armitage’s “artist” credentials? I don’t know — and while the answers to these questions would interest me, I’m commenting less on that today that on on my general impressions of Armitage in Australia.

Personally: The whirlwind tour of local media to mark the Australian release of the DVD leaves me with unbridled good feelings about Armitage. I liked the Richard Armitage we saw and heard from in Sydney. So did fans — tumblr exploded with ecstatic reports from fans on things that were said — and we’re grateful to them, as it looks like the material we ultimately receive from Popcorn Taxi is likely to be scrubbed of things Armitage fans might want to know badly, but its editors consider irrelevant. A number of tweeted candids showed Armitage with his now well-known “fan candid” expression — betraying no discomfort with the genre or the practice. I particularly liked one that showed him with his left leg extended — trying once again to minimize the height difference between himself and the rest of the adoring world? It was interesting to observe the panorama of reports from different fans and the diverse elements they emphasized. As a historian, the evaluation of evidence in service of the reconstruction of “what happened” is my stock in trade, but nothing has taught me more convincingly that events are created by their observers than my own experiences observing our fandom observe Richard Armitage.

[Right: Armitage in charge and absorbed at the Popcorn Taxi Q & A in Sydney, May 1, 2013. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

I have nothing to add on the data collection point. In watching the available video, I thought microexpressions occasionally betrayed him as a bit tired — but given the stresses of jetlag on top of the pressure of being “on” all day, that’s unsurprising. Most notably, even as he appeared the most sovereign and in control of the interview situations in which he appeared that he ever has — who would have imagined the at times apparently diffident Richard Armitage of 2007 talking shyly to Lorraine about Guy of Gisborne managing forty minutes of Q & A with open questions from the audience on his own with such physical aplomb? — the possibility that he might have been overwhelmed by some of the publicity tasks set for him again humanized him and made him familiar to us.

The strongest note of the events for me (not having seen the Popcorn Taxi footage in full yet, of course), however, was a lighthearted, youthful, hilarious — I suppose some people might say “juvenile” — Armitage who’s rarely been so visible in recent years as he was in Sydney. The Richard Armitage on view and on air in Sydney joked about the middle name, “freakin’,” offered details of a potentially disgusting “signature dish,” and admitted under pressure from a host but even so, with laughter, that he knew how to light farts on fire. He claimed he’d asked to ski down a New Zealand mountain while costumed as Thorin Oakenshield, asserted that Thorin would beat Dwalin in a cage fight, joked suggestively about his appearance in a pseudo-pornographic dwarf gift calendar, looked at Thorin fan art without cringing (too much, anyway), hugged a Kermit the Frog doll, and let a fan touch his beard. All the while, he appeared convincingly to enjoy himself with an aplomb and lack of restraint that we have rarely seen from him.

I keep writing “rarely” here because one of the things my rereading of Armitage’s early personal messages to fans and the early media trail as I write the “My Richard Armitage” series has revealed is that at the beginning of his career, he did show all these elements of boyish humor, particularly in radio interviews. Remember the Richard Armitage who joked that he didn’t have to research kicking people, admitted that he picked his nose, said, “Cheers, mate!” to a radio host who told he was especially fit, said that he didn’t like to see audiences hatchet-faced in response to acting in serious stage productions, “honked” about songs he liked or didn’t like, and so on? Remember the novice with the fans who joked about looking like Brad Pitt? And even slightly later made jokes about being arrested at a Hungarian sausage counter? Once upon a time, there was a Richard Armitage who liked to have fun at least some of the time, and managed to convey that aspect of his personality quite successfully. But the North & South juggernaut, as it took on speed and caused the press to pay attention, invested many of us increasingly in a more serious Armitage, one who was above all modest, artistic, cultured, shy, and oblivious to or seriously uncomfortable with his personal appeal. And when Armitage agreed, in 2009, with journalists who asked him about his very vocal fandom, that fans could be out there, to the extent that he felt the need to apologize for misunderstandings and restate his gratefulness to the fans who supported his career, and then stated in spring of 2010 that he had perhaps gotten too involved with his fans, concerned people in our ranks concluded that perhaps Armitage might even prefer us to ignore him.

Now, these personality elements are not mutually exclusive — it’s possible to be both serious, virtuous, and reserved and lighthearted, youthful, and hilarious (or juvenile) all at once. But it can be a hard series of personality features to navigate in public for fans, particularly when fans or segments of fans are demanding evidence for their specific worldviews and when there’s no “whole Richard” to stack up the little data bits against for comparison. The problem with press and the Internet as a whole is that they, and we, magnify a particular impression in the echo chambers of our minds as we talk it over with no data to question our perceptions. In the end, the data that created the impression in the first place is all we have access to and the outliers and potential counter-data have to be hypothesized. This effect is no less true of me than it is of others. I do not hide the fact that I prefer a competent, adult, open Richard Armitage who may occasionally stray over the line of taste for some segments of his audience to someone feels obligated to hide every moment of his humor or every potentially questionable moment in his personality for fear of causing offense. I imagine that kind of pressure on a personality to be horrid; but I also did not believe that Armitage was really suffering from it unreasonably. I, like many fans, was highly frustrated two years ago with the increasing pressure inside segments of the fandom to make Armitage into a world-foreign creature who didn’t really known how to deal with fans, fame, career, and possibly elements of his life, and thus needed us to stay away. So happily, in my view, the “stay away from Armitage” trope seems to have been somewhat dampened by all the pleasant candids and Armitage / fan photos we’ve been privileged to see since the end of November, 2012.

The picture from Sydney was consistent with those photos and with the general impression, growing since then, of an Armitage at ease with himself, enjoying himself in public, and willing to say something things that are not either incredibly polite or hopelessly prescripted. While fan response to the stylist’s clothing choices for him at the Popcorn Taxi event were mixed, in at least some of the pictures that appeared, the choicke of a grey t-shirt and leather jacket suggested he was wearing clothes in a style he’d pick out for himself. Of course, we only know Armitage as he appears in these media settings, which makes it extremely hard to judge when he might be teasing us, however gently, either with his clothes or with his words. It’s not that no serious interviews appeared from Sydney — those were in evidence as well, and there was plenty of personal fodder for the fan of “Serious Armitage” as well, particularly the mention of fan sites that he slyly suggested give him book tips (C19, I’m looking at you), and the signals that he’s hoping to do a less effect-laden film, possibly from literature. (I admit — I’d love to see him do a literature-based film, but at the same time, I hear him say “LITracher” in his English accent in my mind and have to suppress my silly Yankee kneejerk giggle. So who’s juvenile now? Juvenile Armitage for a juvenile fan like me.) I left these interviews again feeling like I had an idea of things that were important to Armitage as an artist and an actor and a human being — hard work, knowing the source (Tolkien), cooperation with an excellent director and cooperation with one’s colleagues.

[Left: Richard Armitage as he actually dresses? Photographed by Tracey Nearmy, Sydney, 2013. Source: RichardArmitageNet]

Moreover, the framework always affects the results of such interviews. It’s possibly easier to let down social inhibitions and joke on radio, not only because one is not seen by most of the audience, but also because the fading of FM as a format in the face of new music delivery systems means that DJs all over the world are speaking more and more outrageously in order to sustain ratings. (Last year, roughly around the time of the Hobbit royal premiere, events at an Australian radio made its hosts questionable “stars” in this development.) Perhaps it’s Australians themselves, who have a reputation in the U.S. as being more relaxed, more open, more willing to be edgy and blunt, and not afraid of saying things that might be considered raw in other settings. I remember thinking as I listened to this radio segment that the interviewers were getting more out of him because they were significantly less serious than their UK counterparts have been. Also: less professional and/or less polite, as some Australian fans have said, who found aspects of this media blitz embarrassing to their national reputation. No way to please everyone, I suppose. (For what it’s worth, Australian readers, I left this week behind me liking Australians even more than I had before.)

I can’t leave out another possibility, of course — that we saw another visage of chameleon Armitage, that just as Armitage has worked to give directors and co-stars and audiences and fans what they needed from him over the years, he responds to the cues and prompts of the people he finds himself with. Interviewers who want serious Armitage get serious Armitage; those who want funny Armitage get funny Armitage (though he doesn’t see himself as funny, apparently); those who want virtuous Armitage get that one; and interviewers who ask him to quiz on Tolkien characters vs. IKEA furniture get the witty, quick, joking man who sounds ten to fifteen years younger than his chronological age. If you ask Richard Armitage the “people pleaser” to say his line this way, he’ll try; If you ask him to teach you how to walk like a dwarf, he’ll comply as well. All of these things are real within Armitage — and at the same time, the requests of his interlocutors call particular combinations of them forth. This time, in Australia, the request was for youthful, funny, irreverent Richard.

Naturally, this post offers a provisional comment on two days in a particular week in the life of someone who I observe via quickly opening and closing windows created for me by professional commodifiers, and only at a very, very great distance. Synecdoche is going wild here. Still, I’ve thought for some time that a lot of the various shadings of personality we perceive in these publicity appearances — elements that make Richard Armitage the actor and the person so intriguing to think about — result from the possibility that like the personalities of the characters he builds, Richard Armitage is possessed of strongly contradictory elements inside himself. I’ve also thought that an actor’s identity is potentially necessarily more fluid than that of someone like me and perhaps Richard Armitage’s identity is unusually porous precisely so that he can accommodate the necessary perception of the world to feed his creative work. Those are themes for another day in the continuing parsing of possible answers to the question, “Who was / is Richard Armitage?” But whatever the factors that combined to give us such a pleasant press junket, this latest permutation of Armitage was one I found tremendously likeable. If I were going to be cynical, I’d say: This is one you can sell, marketers.

If I were going to be more serious, like the people I cited at the beginning of this post, I’d be delighted if the Sydney events squelched the “precious Armitage” trope in the same way that spontaneous fan candids have silenced, at least for now, the “stay away from Armitage” trope. If the moments of a youthful, lighthearted funny guy that we saw were pieces of a less cautious Richard Armitage peaking out — I can only encourage him to continue. Not because I’m looking for someone “more real,” and I certainly don’t want to encourage a performance of something that’s not there — but because I never believed in “precious Armitage” as it was articulated in the fandom, and because it seems to me the pressure to be that particular Armitage might be an unnecessarily heavy burden to place on our crush, heavier than the burden of admitting he laughs over horse poo, as he did long ago, anyway.

If I were going to say something to the man directly: Armitage has talked about the three hundred mile stare (? am I getting that right?) in the past. This is a nine-thousand mile grin from me, Mr. Armitage, if you’re still Down Under. Wherever you are, whoever you are, however, I hope you’re feeling it, too. You seemed real this week, Mr. Armitage, as real as you’ve ever seemed or could seem in this strange, echoing, virtual world we inhabit together.

~ by Servetus on May 8, 2013.