Everyman receding? Pondering the subject position(s) of Richard Armitage fans, including my own

[post tangentially inspired by a conversation with WesternFan.]

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The most recent sighting: Richard Armitage at “The Book of New Zealand,” November 30, 2013, Los Angeles, California, ©HeatherVideos. Source: heathdances on Instagram.

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We’re about to hit it again — in approximately 24 hours, the appearance of The Armitage on the red carpet in Los Angeles. Last time was so amazing that it remains my most vivid Richard Armitage fangirling memory!

I already can’t wait, even though as soon as I publish this post I have to get off the computer and grade, grade, grade for tomorrow. Though Lego mini-Thorin has informed me that he plans to make a brief appearance later tonight. He’s starting the party early and very short plastic figures have to work harder to do that.

Somehow I can’t imagine that last year will top this year for me, but whether it reaches that level or not, a few things are certain. Fans will line up in Los Angeles to try to catch a glimpse! There’ll be streaming! yelling! squeeing! tweeting! retweeting! photo ops! interviews! Tons of enjoyment!

Every fan is a new fan once. “Veterans” like me profit from the amazing euphoria that accompanies an event like this, much of which comes from the newest fans, whose excitement reinvigorates and recharges mine. New fans in particular get the unburdened opportunity to do something a little unpredictable or a random golden opportunity to ask a silly question or to make a zany misstep. It’s so much fun for the rest of us to watch and cheer or watch and groan and remember our own baby fandom glee and innocence.

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The place where Richard Armitage stood at the event above! Maybe because we haven’t seen a solo posed picture from an official source yet? Did you run away from the camera again, Armitage? Source: MiddleEarthNews on FB.

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And amidst the euphoria — disappointment. (Here I start to sound experienced, but I hope, not jaded.) The fans who were there but didn’t catch a glimpse, or caught a glimpse but didn’t have the hoped-for line of sight or the chance for an encounter. The fans who have to work during the streaming. The fans who put up pictures and get criticized. The fans who put up pictures and see them reappear in a nonstop stream on other social media. Re: the photos, I repeat my previous advice, stolen from a friend — any picture put onto the Internet when and where people are looking for it will never again be the sole property of its owner. Those of us who can’t bear a misinterpretation or a misappropriation should probably keep such photos private. As much as that decision would sadden me, because I adore the stream of these pictures and the adrenaline rush they cause. But I would rather any fellow fan leave a fan encounter with the happiest possible memories.

From euphoria to disappointment and everything possible in between. From our screens at home, this is how it has gone.

Tomorrow night, Armitage will step onto the red carpet, styled again this time, as we know well, by Ilaria Urbinati. (In case you haven’t already read it, there’s a great article here about what she does and how she does it. I found it fun to read and imagine Richard Armitage engaged in this activity and wonder who went along with him to judge. Plus: Urbinati’s styled Miles Teller, whose work Armitage has complimented as transforming the acting of Nicole Kidman.) He will be wearing something predictably fashionably spectacular. Of course, fashion involves more than simply what’s in style right now — in my opinion, one should ask oneself at least four more questions before agreeing to wear anything in public — but whatever he wears, it will be “in” because it’s also exposure for the brand and he probably got some discount for wearing it.

We’ll all scream — because it’s him! We love him! Don’t we love him??!?? OMG!

For ten days while the premieres happen and until the film is in general release, pictures will constitute most of what we have to discuss (for those of us who don’t make use of bittorrent, anyway) and we will take them apart, detail by detail, with some fans unearthing (unwebbing?) ever higher resolution versions and unwatermarking them and so on. Fans who really love his look will make immediate, lightning evaluations. Because it’s easy to be positive, quickly, when we’re euphoric.

As for me — because people tend to hate it in when I say how I feel immediately — and by temperament, predictably, at some point, some detail of his clothing will catch my eye, as the cuff button did last year, or the trouser break. I live for the trouser break because I’m such an Armitage boots freak, and I’ll write a whole history of how The Armitage has worn or not worn this style feature before. That’s more or less my point of entry into this — I’m not dressing a man these days, even when I did I didn’t have high end brands at my disposal or men whose bodies fit well into those clothes, and so I don’t follow men’s high fashion very closely. I don’t know enough about what’s in to tell him whether he should wear Zegna or Tom Ford or Helmut Lang — I just know what I like in men’s clothing fit and features, can gush on about it for a long time, and can make basic recommendations about features to look for.

And honestly, for the most important thing is that he look competent and appropriate. He doesn’t have to be the most stylish man on the red carpet; I just want him not to look silly. Admittedly, my standards for that may be somewhat broader than those of other fans. In my opinion, everything he’s worn in these appearances since May of 2010 has been well beyond adequate, if some examples of it were more to my taste (BAFTA 2010) than others (Captain America Los Angeles premiere).

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Source.

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And finally, the thing will come that was hardest for me to process last year — the takedowns. Armitage’s clothing, and by extension not just that, will become the object of fan hostility. This development — it’s always a minority, of course — takes the longest because sometimes one feels a reaction of immediate non-response (blah / meh) or even discomfort when one sees him in a new setting or new clothing. This or something akin to it happened to me with the two recent photoshoots. But it takes a while to figure out what’s bugging one, I think. It happened back in the day when he was dressing himself kind of incompetently, but it hasn’t stopped now; in fact, it may even be getting more intense as his clothes get better and more appropriate to the occasions on which he wears them and more people are around to argue with. I’m not going to link to the one I’m thinking of in this context because reading it still depresses the heck out of me. I got a bunch of comments last year in the same vein from first-time commentators as well, and I ended up not publishing any of them because they were just plain mean.

Of the tone: we’ll cut you down to size now, thank you very much.

I don’t believe by any means that a fan has to love everything associated with Richard Armitage. No minimum requirement involved! I don’t, as I said recently. And I suppose you can be a fan and spend a lot of time tearing your crush down. Still, I wonder where that sentiment comes from. I sympathize insofar as my own requests to fellow fans to follow the maxim “don’t like / don’t read” when stuff appears here that troubles them often fall on deaf ears. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that any of this stuff doesn’t matter or doesn’t matter that much. I get why one cares a whole heck of a lot about the detail level of things — my goodness, do I ever get that. That’s half of how my brain works. I’ve written at this point what must be well past a quarter million words — I stopped counting years ago — because I get that it matters. I love that scene from The Devil Wears Prada where Meryl Streep schools Anne Hathaway about the blue sweater and why caring about the shade of blue is important because I do find things like that important; but / and they’re engaged in a business. If Ilaria Urbinati got exercised about Armitage’s clothing, now that I would understand. I just don’t understand why, when it doesn’t conform to expectations in this case, anyone else would be exercised about it beyond a shrug or a kind expression of concern. Surely my like or dislike of Armitage’s apparel choices can’t be so consequential as to get angry about it? There’s been a lot of anger lately that I’ve been trying hard to understand. And what I want to understand is not so much the content of the identity battle itself, or who did or said what, but rather what a German would call the Streitgründe, but the energy behind it.

Talking with WesternFan about something entirely different this week shed some new light on this problem for me. Her position was that “Richard Armitage everyman” is incredibly important to many in the fandom — the notion that Armitage is a down-to-earth guy, just like us, who was talented and worked very hard. I identify with that too, on some level, obviously, but I felt it didn’t have to be a necessary point of identification. WesternFan felt it did.

“You don’t get this,” she noted, patiently, “because you don’t think you have a chance with Armitage.”

I conceded that point. Various sexual and conversational and intellectual or emotional fantasies notwithstanding, my notional relationship with Richard Armitage, such as it is, has never really included the belief that we’d be potentially workable partners in real life. (I keep meaning to write about why not, but as you know, time is short.) I’m definitely “in love” with him, but it’s a love of a vision of him that includes not just a fantasy of love (whatever that is) but more importantly, the notion of him and his characters as a mirror for my experiences. In that sense, for me, Armitage is what he is perceptible as being, and the fantasy will end when he stops being a potential mirror — a development that is dependent both on my own needs and what happens in my life and the extent to which his moves correspond to those needs and developments, as well as the persistence of my own capacity to keep telling myself a story about him that’s emotionally and creatively productive for me.

“And people think I’m living in a fantasy world. I don’t understand,” I typed, “why anyone thinks that. He isn’t going to date any of us. He’s barely going to meet any of us.”

WesternFan pursued the point, though, and I remembered that I had made that point once upon a time myself, in a long discussion of Annabel Capper that’s still the most viewed post on this blog, even if I don’t think about it much any more. (Poor Annabel Capper, to have her available performances most memorialized by me, I sometimes think.) I’d written that her image, so principled and very pretty but not spectacularly or conventionally beautiful and so plausibly “real” made him a more attractive fantasy.

“It’s not that they think they will meet him, or will date him. It’s that fantasy that they could. Annabel Capper makes the average woman think,” WesternFan explained, “that he’s the kind of guy who wouldn’t set the bar for dating at the movie star appearance level, that he’d love a talented, good woman. He’s an ordinary guy, who’d have a regular relationship, like we all have.”

“OK,” I typed.

“I think right now,” she continued, “he’s making a lot of fans nervous with his ‘new’ opinions and his fancy modeling spreads. He’s moving out of reach.”

Ouch. Succinct and to the point, and it reminds me a lot of things that have happened in the last few weeks and indeed, over the years. The frustration of legacy fans as new fans came in and conflicts started, the constant urging to new fans not to do that or Armitage won’t send us any more messages, and so on. Armitage was incredibly close to his fans at the beginning of his career, and at every new stage he moves just a little further away. These events, as joyful as they are, are also a reminder of that.

Armitage looking well turned-out on a red carpet makes us proud, but it equally makes him the man who can afford (or whose backers can afford) — the likes of Ilaria Urbinati, who gets $500-1,000 for a single appearance, $10,000-$20,000 for a press tour (which includes packing of the clothes and detailed instructions as to what to put on where and how). As the author of that piece wrote, it’s not just about clothes for him anymore, even as that’s what we see: “A star’s outfit is ontologically distinct from an outfit you or I might wear. In the surface-oriented world of a Ryan Gosling or a Jake Gyllenhaal, clothing is less body shelter than elevator pitch—a case to be made in a time period measured by red-carpet lengths.” He’s selling himself to the members of a higher price class than most of us will ever occupy. He’s still our Richard Armitage, but in leaving the appearance of Everyman Armitage behind, it feels like he’s leaving us behind, too.

I didn’t think that was ever true, even as Armitage’s modus of interacting with fans has changed — as have the allegiances of the fans, once invested mostly in costume drama, now probably predominantly in fantasy and comics and action. I’ve never bought the argument that the gradual dimunition in the number of messages to fans meant that Armitage cared less about us or was disgusted with our behavior. The size of his career has changed, and he has to change with it. In fact, from the same article, we learn that “[i]n the cautious universe of branding, appearance is an expression of discipline.”

This beautiful Armitage is our same hard worker, getting coached, figuring out how to do it right. He can still be us, our mirror or crush. We can still all love him together. We can still squee together at that red carpet, wherever we are in the world. If we don’t get too nervous.

~ by Servetus on December 2, 2013.