Lucas North unconsoled, Richard Armitage uncivilized

[Yes, I’m aware I’m discussing this scene out of series context.]

[And yeah, I’ve seen those “ads” patches appear on the bottom of each post. I’m probably going to buy the “No Ads” upgrade to get rid of them, but for now, your patience is appreciated. Don’t click; I don’t earn any money from them. “me + richard” has no  plans to monetize.]

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Above is one of the scenes in Richard Armitage’s oeuvre that I’ve been watching heavily lately. I’ve been watching a lot of Spooks. This surprises me a little because, although I haven’t written much about the meaning of Spooks for me, and why I keep watching it, when I saw it for the first time, it was clearly — in the line of my interest in North & South because of vocational and moral issues around work — because of the whole question of betrayals. Lucas North didn’t end up being in my top three roles Armitage has played, in the end, but I remember talking about it with my therapist at the time, that I felt that the major theme of the series was betrayals at work, a problem that held a lot of my attention in the spring of 2011.

Even before I got back from home, sitting in the airport, I immediately turned to Spooks. I think I know why, now.

It’s because one of Lucas’ fundamental defining qualities is his isolation.

Lucas is always, first and foremost, alone.

He has work, and colleagues (with whom he doesn’t appear to socialize), but he has no wife, his romantic relationships don’t work out, his father is a story from the past (either true, or a legend, the viewer is left to decide), and in series 9, Vaughn prods him with the assertion that even the life he (now John Bateman) has been living is someone else’s.

This is the quality of his I sympathize with most at the moment: his aloneness.

You don’t need to console me and remind me that I’m not really alone. I know — I have all of you and you are great! I’m still responding to the many messages I’ve received from you. I still have family, and colleagues, and many, many RL friends.

And yet, I feel stone cold alone, at the moment. Not lonely in the sense of wishing more people were around. Alone. Bereft in a way that I wouldn’t have guessed. Adrift. As if my connection to something essential has been severed. I don’t know how else to describe it.

As one way of dealing with this, I’m trying to let myself cry. I’ve been having trouble. I can’t do it at work, and mostly I can’t do it around the people I associate with. People around me are trying hard to keep me company so that I don’t feel badly and mostly they’re doing a great job. But when tears do threaten to come, they clearly make people uncomfortable to the point that they intervene to change the topic or touch me or something. It’s not that they mean badly, but clearly open grief is difficult even for good friends to watch.

So I have to cry at other times. Sometimes it happens when I’m watching the rain, for instance, or the sunset. It happens about every other time that I recite the mourner’s prayer. I assume it will happen this Saturday during Yizkor. I actually kind of hope it will, because everyone will be crying and my grief will be less evident.

I’ve written about Richard Armitage as someone who admits crying before (although now I think the Latin should be oculis flentis and not flens), and in that post, I cited one my favorite comments of his of all time:

It was like: ‘I want to know what that feels like again because I can’t do that in my real life. I can’t cry like that because it’s not civilised.’ That’s when I thought it was really worth it.

[note that this link goes to that interview people don’t like.]

This comment hit me hard this week, and it brought me to that scene above, because it’s a keening cry of both grief and rage, of the kind that civilized people may not do, the expression of an ultimate loss.

Armitage has done other kinds of crying — the submerged face is one example.

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Claude Monet (Richard Armitage) reacts to Camille’s death in episode 2 of The Impressionists. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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Or the nearly brimming eyes, for instance.

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Lucas North (Richard Armitage) notes, ironically, that it’s difficult to discover that someone close to you was not who you thought they were, in Spooks 8.5. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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And real, open, grief, as well — although honestly, I think these tears were added by the makeup people.

John Porter (Richard Armitage) cries with his daughter over the news of his ex-wife’s death. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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I can’t help but note that Didion has commented on this tendency to give people tears as particularly problematic for men crying in film —

[…] real men cry with the same sloppy, ugly abandon that women do. What I can’t understand is how we can see male actors express the ugliest, most terrifying rage and violence onscreen, but never have I seen men crying with abandon as actual men sometimes do. And this hurts both men and women.

a point I found substantiated in my reaction to Dean O’Gorman’s sloppy crying in “When Love Comes”.

But the Armitage crying that I’m gravitating to at the moment is the crying in the scene above, when Lucas, having outdriven his former MI-5 colleagues, turns to look at Maya and discovers that she’s been fatally shot. All of the crucial scenes of his life and identity flash through his mind, and he simply can’t accept what he knows is about to happen.

And his cries are rage, and grief, rage and grief over her death, rage and grief over the loss of his dreams, rage and grief over everything that’s ever happened to him in his life, and he screams, in one long cry, “No……!” and then a weaker rejoinder. Anger and rage — and the realization that falls it, that the rage will have no object, that the moment where everything could have changed has passed, irrevocably.

I recognize that cry. It’s the one that grabs me, late at night, when I am at all alone, when I’ve finished my prayers and am lying in bed, flat on my back, and waiting for sleep to come. It’s the cry of absolute rage and grief and denial and refusal to come to terms. The cry that makes me stuff my hand in my mouth so as not to disturb the neighbors, but that chokes its way out of my throat nonetheless. That cry Lucas makes because nothing can ever possibly be whole, ever again. That cry that denies reality even as he knows he has no choice to come to terms with it.

I don’t know how to describe it, really. I just know that I know that cry, now. Of confrontation with reality; of refusal to believe. That cry that forces its way out even as I seek to suppress it, that overtakes me at night and won’t let go of me.

Grief. Rage. Denial. That cry that wants to unmake the world, against all reason.

~ by Servetus on September 12, 2013.