Star Trek: Into Darkness, movies these days, and Richard Armitage: Excursus on hype

Continued from here, kind of. Or maybe it’s a detour. But not really. Anyway, there’s more to that piece than what follows, but this got a bit overdeveloped so I am putting it here. Or whatever. This is not especially well connected.

Back to the initial point, which was thinking about the entertainment news (especially Brad Pitt and World War Z) in light of Armitage and his future. Because I had drawn that connection much earlier, and was reminded of it by the trailers and my reaction to them, as I was driving home from the theater, I was thinking about whether and how my reactions to Star Trek: Into Darkness apply to Richard Armitage and, unavoidably, to the energy that drives “me + richard armitage.”

Let me preface my reflections by stating that (a) Armitage’s decisions are his own — how could they be otherwise? — and that he knows best what he wants (not I); I think he’s chosen well so far and will continue to do what’s best for him, which should be his primary concern, and that (b) I have no worries about his representation’s capacity to act effectively on his behalf. I try hard to avoid prescriptions for his professional future. Also, obviously, I’m no expert on the entertainment industry or entertainment marketing. I have no idea what Armitage’s professional ambitions really involve beyond what he’s said in the press — which include things like a variety of roles, more film work, the oft-mentioned desire for a return to the stage, artistic challenges, and work with directors he’d like to work with.

In short, as always, this is all about me.

IIIA. me + the comparative effects of hype and audience involvement

[Right: Richard Armitage with fans at Tokyo premiere of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, December 2, 2012. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

I don’t think of myself as part of the target audience for blockbusters — I followed Harry Potter, but because I loved the books. I saw Captain America: The First Avenger only because you-know-who was in it. I don’t object to big screen action or superheroes; I even think they have a social-political function at the moment; but the other films I’ve seen in this genre, I’ve seen mostly at the behest of friends. Right now I don’t go to movies much, but in my last city, when I did, it was almost always to (non-action) dramas and smaller release films. Dear Friend steered me to the worthwhile stuff among that city’s amazing palette of choices. As a consumer, then, I speak about my reaction to big action films tentatively and in full awareness that — as my students told me during the course break on Friday — I’m not the target for most of them.

I didn’t catch any Star Trek: Into Darkness ads ahead of time, beyond the alert that Cumberbatch had been cast. I did see in my FB feed that the trailer was out. At least one close Armitage friend told me she’d seen it in the theater and was definitely sold. But I spend most of my time on slow café wifi and stay away from non-essential vids, so I didn’t look at it. When the film came out, I read a handful of the initial reviews.

After seeing ST:ID, I started comparing my response to it and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. In the latter case, I was invested in the film because of Richard Armitage. No way was I going to miss it. I didn’t participate in the entire hype wave — at some point in November 2012 I’d had enough, and tuned out teasers and spoilers — but I followed most of it. Not least because making the film took so darn long — if I wanted news and images of Armitage, I had no choice — but also because I’d known since sixth grade how the story ended. And I’m sure the hype got me invested in enjoying the film, to the extent that I now wonder if I’d have enjoyed ST:ID more if I’d seen its advance publicity, or The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey less if I hadn’t. I also had the strong feeling that like me, the people in the theater with me at the December 2012 premiere knew what to expect — that they were waiting for the joke at the end of the goblin chase, for instance. So one question for me is — especially with these films that have so much eye-fatiguing action that it’s hard to catch it all on one view anyway — is the advance hype necessary so that the audience has the necessary prerequisite narrative and visual vocabulary to enjoy the film once they see it? Or even so they are familiar with the basic features of a story that has to be edited down to its most remarkable moments in order to fit into the format?

The hype as an aspect of our participation in these films continued and continues — as sloan remarked in the comments a few posts ago, Peter Jackson believes in “constant contact.” Richard Armitage called it a “drip.” This is really true; every time I catch my breath and think I’ll have time to process and analyze what I know with a little sanity, more information drizzles down on me. This happened at first with the regular vlogs, with the advance release of the pictures of the cast in summer 2011, and then with more or less uninterrupted, steady publicity for anyone who was even slightly interested after about February of 2012. The film premiere itself was both preceded and followed by interviews, with the press rush for the first DVD rush quickly on its heels, trailer for the second film, another vlog coming this week some time and (one imagines) one for the end of the pickups. Then there’ll be more publicity for the extended DVD in the fall, and then the pre-release publicity, the premieres, and resulting reviews and interviews, taking us in 2014.

Maybe it’s not fair to think about ST:ID vs The Hobbit in this context, because it’s taken so long to make the two, now three, films — and I can see why Jackson would want to keep people awake and involved. But whether or not it’s fair, after several of the dwarves started tweeting and making FB updates, I started to get even more involved in the progress of the production.

I really never thought that Richard Armitage *should* tweet (especially if he didn’t want to, or as he said, didn’t “get twitter”), as I myself am an ambivalent tweep — I mostly broadcast my own links and have short conversations, because misunderstanding arises way too easily in 140 char if the words are not formulated carefully. But I confess even my own fairly intensely-felt sentiment about that position and defense of Richard Armitage’s right to refrain from tweeting and to remain untweeted in his free time has weakened in the last month, as the other actors playing dwarves tweet pictures of the New Zealand sky, of themselves out in the evenings at bars, celebrating birthdays, or taking part in charity events. I find myself daydreaming about what might be happening on any given day in Wellington in the same say that I used to calculate the hours ahead to GMT + 1 and think about what my favorite person was doing. Am I getting wistful about a hype relationship with Richard Armitage that I’ve never had? And that he apparently has no inclination to initiate?

And even if I’d like to know more about Richard Armitage’s future projects — I’d like to know that more than I care about who he’s going to the bar with in his probably limited free time — how much is too much? To be honest, I’d been suffering some Hobbit fatigue and had been ready to turn to writing about some other Armitage matters, but when the trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug appeared, I fell right back into the excitement, to the point that I’m now wondering about myself a little.

So. I was never not going to see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and in that sense, I was something like a Cumberbatch fan going to see ST: ID. The more I learned about Thorin Oakenshield over the fall of 2012, the more interested I got in that story — and marketers couldn’t have fully anticipated that sort of personal trajectory — the thing that made me an Armitage fan –, I think. I also am convinced that if Armitage’s role had been minor, or I thought he hadn’t done well in the film, I wouldn’t have seen it a dozen times in the theaters, or bought two editions of the DVD.  (I saw Captain America once and haven’t bought the DVD yet.) And I wouldn’t be watching it about once a week still.

Wow, is this incoherent. What can I pull out of it for going forward?

• Based on the comparison of my advance experiences of these films, I am wondering about the function of all the hype for the success of the big blockbuster film — the point seems to get everyone to feel like a shareholder ahead of time so they buy in heavily at the moment of release of artistic product and merchandise. I have ambivalent reactions to that. I enjoy participating in the hype, but …
• My positive reaction to the TDOS trailer suggests to me that I may have become something like an addict who needs a little more junk each time. I was actually almost “off” Hobbit news and now I’m hooked again.
• I ponder how all of this — how the ways that I’ve been made into a Hobbit shareholder already via my allegiance to Armitage– are being used intentionally to affect my judgment or are having that effect unintentionally. It wasn’t so much that I could look at Armitage’s work dispassionately before, but my capacity to do that is being progressively retarded by his participation in this project.
• I wonder what the effect of all of this — “this” being the requirement to participate in much of the advance marketing and sales of the film — might be on Armitage. That’s actually a good cliffhanger for next time.

I’m going to post this now and go defiantly off to bed — possible appearance of the next vlog at any moment be damned. See, Peter Jackson, I’m still independent! I am!

~ by Servetus on June 18, 2013.