Richard Armitage and the durability of Guy of Gisborne, part 3

Continued from part 1 and part 2 of a meditation on Richard Armitage’s remark that he felt the scene in Robin Hood 1.7 between Guy and Marian over the necklace was like a mini-play.

After her rhetorical and status triumph in the previous portion of the sequence, Marian mounts the stairs to her bedchamber and begins to toss it to simulate a robbery. I’ve cut the final sequence to begin the scene as Guy ascends the stairs to force the confrontation from which he had just been willing to let her escape.

***

***

Guy is back in control as Armitage moves back toward the low tone, coiled up, dangerous, but still flat affect expression, when he has Guy lean with a sort of weary cosmopolitanism against the threshold to the room.

The question is how much of that weariness is a put-on. Guy’s willingness to show his rage openly is pitched a tad higher than it had been at the opening of the previous scene, a sign that this exchange will start with a higher energy level of open aggression. Guy has no more patience for Marian’s deceptions. Guy struggles visibly from this point onward to maintain his composure, balancing between the constant interference of actual anger with a low-voiced, sarcastic mien, one that appears not lack its brief moment of regret, or at least chagrin, and perhaps self-reproach for letting himself be too open. It’s this potential for self-reproach (why did I let myself trust her?) that raises a fundamental question for interpreting the scene. Armitage said at some point that at first he wanted Marian for the status she granted, and because Robin wanted her, but that the sentiment developed into more. The question remains — as always with Armitage’s oh-so-complex portrayals — into what? Several things, probably.

“My, oh my,” Guy says, as he advances relentlessly toward a nervous Marian, “Robin Hood’s broken in and stolen” (stomp, chin lift) “the necklace.” Very effective delivery, I think, with a carefully measured violence that indicates both restraint and fury — especially if we ask ourselves how someone this angry can get a viewer through a scene that will ultimately last close to four minutes without overloading us at the very beginning and then leaving the character nowhere to go.

But when Guy makes it within striking range of Marian, his eyes seem dead, his face even a bit humiliated — as if he’s almost too tired to be violent with her.

If we look at the next few frames of the clip, what we see is a sort of alternative experience of fatigue and shame:

Armitage draws out this mood over several seconds (roughly 0:21-0:23) and after watching it several times, trying to figure out what is happening, I wondered if we’re seeing him slow down the rapid eyelash movement that we often see from his characters when they become distressed (both Standring and Mr. Thornton offer good examples of this facial movement). This feels like a slower version of that move.

In any case, at 0:23, we witness the interaction’s resumption. Guy states to Marian that he thought she was his friend. It’s interesting to contemplate the shame of the previous moments of the scene against the possibility that Guy is lying or being manipulative here (again, think back to 1.5, where we see him grasp Marian’s bloody sleeve and think, man, he must know what is going on). He’s back to flat affect, but a slight tensing of his brow at 0:28, almost a wince, and a brief but clearly noticeable catch in his breath as he says “attention.” The rise in the pitch of Guy’s voice toward the top of Armitage’s baritone seem to signal genuine pain.

When Marian insists that Guy’s charges are untrue, we see the pained expression join the flat affect, and I, at least, am convinced about that piece of it, that Guy’s sense of having been betrayed is more genuine than we might have thought, or that he feels the emotional level of it acutely. (It’s important to ask about the genuineness of Guy’s sentiment here, I might add, because of how this scene ends.)

Look at Guy’s right eyebrow, above, and at the variety of expressions and attempts to negate them that run across his face at 0:35-36. He recovers his composure when he can assert his superior — accurate — worldview and scoff at her unwillingness to maintain the truth,

but he loses status again as he gives her the space to mourn conditions in Nottingham. Does he do this to give himself a moment to process the loss of his picture of her, or of his plans? Or is it an inability to contest what she’s saying? The fatigue with which he responds suggests the former; the shaking of the head and the tensing of his lips, the latter. This is one of those moments where the camera notices that he’s beautiful, so it gives us a few extra seconds to glimpse his mood. In the end, perhaps, it doesn’t matter to him; his glance becomes aimless as he realizes (or decision?) that he will not be able to save her.

But after 0:57, Guy’s gestures are relentless — he cannot admit of her worldview but she’s once again asserting her status. Look at his variety of responses in the background.

His head is bowed at 1:10 and he slowly raises it, and (in combination with the score) the viewer sees a gathering scene energy here. Guy still believes nothing remains to be said,

and that her “something to show [him]” is a ruse, but he’s forced to take notice, his glance drawn toward his.

After 1:23, strikingly, Guy gains energy as he realizes Marian has the necklace to give him. This subtle shift in mood signals again, I think, that the rage-filled quality of the whole confrontation stemmed as much from his personal feelings of sadness and shame about his feelings toward Marian as an unworthy object of desire as from his desire to reasserting his sovereignty in the wake of her betrayals.

Guy seems to feel a combination of joy and astonishment to see the necklace.

But after Guy’s ready response of an apology to Marian when she demands it (this is a moment that truly wins me for Guy, at least for a second — even if this is the result of a status conflict, or one of those curious moments of “mothering” Guy cited earlier in the series, there’s refreshingly no male posturing here) is that moment of recognition — at around 1:51, where we return to Guy’s apparently constant world of interminable calculation. If Marian can make a plausible case about the necklace, and Guy still wishes to win her, then he can be on her side again — even if he still believes she betrayed him — and now the concrete problem is the Sheriff.

Armitage’s microexpressions at this point in the scene are such that we can practically see the wheels turning in Guy’s brain.

And so, once again, Guy can press the offensive.

His calculation over how the Sheriff responds is replaced at 2:05 with the hard sell to Marian about how he will not be able to protect her and her father.

And it’s from this point that I think I see one of the more masterful acting moves of Armitage’s career to this point.

I always wonder, particularly when I see certain gestures reproduced across characters (a classic example would be Armitage’s “hand to face” distress move) to what extent these are either Armitage’s own personal signals or stock signals that he’s modifying slightly, based on the emotional mood he creates in the characters. The eyebrow flutter referred to above is another one of these — practically every Armitage character does it. (It’s charming; I’m not complaining). What do I think is so spectacular?

After 2:05 in this clip, Guy begins to use his own emotional language  — precisely the signals he had used early to signal emotions that I had concluded were reasonably sincere — cynically. And yet, because we’ve seen and interpreted them in light of sincerity only moments before, though we know them to be ironic here, we are unsettled as interpreters, asking ourselves if this can really be the man who has just sold us on his true suffering. The high point of this exploitation, to which Armitage moves Guy around 2:16, are the fluttering eyebrows to indicate pained emotion.

And then, at 2:20, Armitage moves even this level of viewer energy up a notch. Guy realizes the full consequences of the advantage he has now obtained — and he physically and rhetorically swoops right in to intensify and capitalize. “Marry me,” he says, realizing that he’s finally in the position, through coercion based on Marian’s betrayal and his awareness of it, to make good the claim that he’s never been able to enforce through attraction or reason.

And now, with the heightening of Guy’s physical intensity — and Marian’s awareness that her own previous moment of triumph has been turned precisely on its head, that she cannot now contest the plot lines of a story that she has narrated herself, that she has trapped herself in a contradiction — we know that Gisborne is pushing it, that he’s exploiting what may have been a sincere feeling just a few moments ago into a poker chip or a political hammer to get what he wants. The result is that Marian has to deny her true feelings for Robin in Robin’s (hidden) presence — one of the only weak moments of the scene, because Jonas Armstrong can only show pain, and nothing more, on his face, thus weakening the energy of this relationship triangle. And Gisborne gets the statement that he wants — that Marian doesn’t want Robin — but only because he can force it from her, thus spoiling exactly what he wants at the precise moment that he forces its creation.

And it’s clear, through Armitage’s depiction of Guy’s shame, that Guy knows this is happening, that he wills it to happen — and, perhaps, despite his belief that Guy is “quite a fine thing,” that he nonetheless suspects that he is worthy of nothing more. At 3:00, there’s a brief moment of subtle optimism in response to Marian’s declaration that she despises Robin, as if he could almost believe her, though it’s fleeting.

Then at 3:02, a motion of the eyes that seems simultaneously delighted and aware of his victory in a slightly malicious way. At 3:04, however, after a moment to ponder all of his options, Guy has decided. He screws his courage to the sticking place and takes a deep breath to collect himself:

And then, at 3:09 and afterwards, he begins to deliver one of the most exploitative marriage proposal in television history, the proposal that exactly suits the motivation behind his question in the first place, a marriage proposal delivered with spite, and with clenched jaw.

Even though he has the advantage, Guy is remarkably still fighting with his own status here, almost as if he expects Marian to continue to win this particular battle.

Marian says yes — and Guy is faced with the problem of how to react to the fact that he has gotten her agreement to what he wanted even as he has practically secured her resentment of the situation. (Note — this is less of a rhetorical problem in the medieval context than it appears to us as modern viewers, but the whole status struggle all the way through this scene makes it clear that even seen from a medieval perspective, Guy knows he’s not good enough and only getting what he wants because of his superior maneuvering.) At 3:33 we see his gasp of relief (she said yes):

but when he raises his head, there is nothing to rejoice over — no love, no jubilation, and not even really a sense of victory, although that is what he has had, technically.

and Guy’s introspective eye movement, and apparent status loss, as he realizes that his bride will celebrate nothing and neither can he is one of the saddest movements in all of series 1.

When he even ventures to move his head in closer proximity to his, Marian moves hers away:

And while this can be read as the maidenly behavior of the well-raised lady, Guy knows it for what it is — she has accepted him as a marital partner, and now, now, an entirely new potential of ways for Marian to reject him opens up.

Guy’s response of humiliation is immediate and Armitage gradually lets him fall even further.

When Marian suggests that they tell Edward the “good news,” in such a measured tone, this awareness hits home in the emotions of both Guy and the viewer. Guy’s head position and the swallow and the meek “yes” all signal the ultimate in abjection.

He raises his eyes as he informs her that he will apologize,

But he glances at her only briefly, now sad to be in her presence, and is gone.

The next post, to conclude what oddly got very long, some reflections, both about the significance of the denouement to this scene as an index of Armitage’s art and its longevity, and the associated problem of trying to harvest a sense of dramatic merit from what’s essentially a rather cheesy piece of series television with relatively little to recommend it.

À bientôt.

~ by Servetus on February 15, 2014.