Speaking for himself, or: Why I like Richard Armitage tweeting

It’s not just that Richard Armitage is funny (although in my opinion he is — my opinion of meat beards here or there, not every joke needs to tickle my fancy), nor that it marks a real career caesura in terms of his publicity (although I think it does, from my long term perspective much more so than the Hobbit: TDOS 2013 publicity blitz did — to me the real break was 2012), nor that he’s used it to promote charitable endeavors. I like all of those things. We’ve always known he was funny. Look at those early messages to fans if you don’t believe me — the “serious Richard” trope which was created in the post-North & South publicity and which many fans jumped on wholeheartedly but in my opinion, mistakenly, and the “precious Richard” trope that predominated among many fans, notwithstanding. Developing more facility with the world of the media can’t hurt him. And my feelings about people with philanthropic sympathies who work actively to assist them are well-known. I could also add that it’s just plain fun to watch. It might be a generalization that younger fans are more comfortable with this means of communication that people my age and older, but so far I’ve gotten nothing but grins from reading his tweets and the fan reactions to them.

All those things are true. Still, the new and most important piece of this for me — and I may have to circle around this for a bit because it’s hard for me to put in a single declarative sentence — is that the decision to tweet, even apart from what he actually tweets, indicates Armitage has decided now to speak for himself, and presumably to do it more regularly.

Now, I’m not saying that what we get in these tweets is 100 percent pure Armitage, divorced from concerns about publicity. Of course it’s not. No one ever says everything about himself, certainly not in 140 characters, and his early adeptness with the medium suggests he’s clearly been advised about how to do this, as was wise. Getting advice on how to communicate is no different from taking an acting class, finding an agent, or getting a stylist; it’s how professionals work and it does not mean that what we read in his tweets is all “just” marketing. In order for marketing to succeed, it must draw on something authentic in order to appeal real. What’s key about this is that, even under advice from professionals or even if someone else is doing all the tweeting, Armitage will be speaking under his guise as himself.

Social media, or in this case a tweet, purports to say: “I am Richard Armitage and I approved this message.” Why is this important, and why should fans care?

We have to remember to distinguish between tweeting as something an actor does to make himself a more appealing media product, and as something he does to communicate to fans. To me, given Armitage’s longstanding reluctance to engage actively with fans via social media, the decision to tweet now clearly falls in the first category — tweeting because it’s something that the professional of today does to promote his career. It says: I care about communicating with the world around me. It says: I am a human and approachable and appealing. And although it’s early days, being able to say he has a certain number of followers is a concrete number that points to an audience that will support his career with money and feet.

In other words, his stated interest in interacting with fans acknowledged, Armitage is not tweeting for fans. It’s not a service he’s providing for us. It’s something — interacting with fans, supporting charities, and above all, supporting his career — something he does for himself. At the same time, however, once Armitage does tweet, fans (casual and serious) are the main audience for what he provides, so that even if tweeting is in itself a professional decision it also has the effect of communicating to us.

Tweeting, to make an obvious statement, is different from his previous strategy for that. Up till now, the once-or-twice-a-year message to fans was something that had no wider professional outcomes. That was something he indeed did mostly for fans, to acknowledge our support, and, I assume to fulfill his own perceived need to say “thank you” in situations where he was grateful for fan support of various kinds. And one only saw them if one was in the circle of people who was looking for them.

The relative brevity of these messages, although they always said something about the writer (and my, did we spend a lot of time trying to figure out what!) meant that despite any additional information about him that emerged in them, those messages always ultimately upheld Armitage’s mysterious qualities. After the first two or three years, the messages appeared quite seldom, and in the interval between messages (and interviews, which were a part of how fans understood what Armitage was saying), fans were free to remake Armitage into the person whom they wanted him to be. This act of remaking, and the incessant conversations that went on between fans in the spaces between messages and publicity, meant that fan constructions of Armitage could often take on a particular cast depending on the preferences of who was having the conversation. This action — of reinterpreting Armitage in light of statements in the spaces between statements he made — is, in fact, how the Richard Armitage tropes developed. Hence the angst and frustration and arguments that often appear right after a new interview — because fans were building a Richard Armitage that we preferred, and here he is, coming to destroy our picture. We have always made Richard Armitage in our own image(s); how dare he come and be his own person in conflict with that image we treasure so deeply? (If possible, let’s blame it on the interviewer rather than acknowledging that Armitage has facets that we haven’t seen or predicted.)

So I welcome Richard Armitage’s tweeting not only for the reasons I stated above — even if the action of doing it, or what he says, doesn’t please every fan who sees herself as an opinion maker, including me, and the potential for fan angst acknowledged — and not only because I think it will help or at least not hurt his career — but also because it potentially provides Armitage with an easier means of building his own construct of himself as opposed to those of him built by his fans.

Tweeting lets Armitage speak for himself, or at least for the image of himself, or the pieces of it, that he wishes to or is willing to show fans. It’s quick, it’s brief, and it can be done without the middleman function he’s used till now. It will give him the opportunity to demonstrate, as often as he chooses, selected facets of himself that go to show that he is who he is, apart from the pictures that we develop of him. Because the point for Armitage isn’t which fan was correct about which facet of his personality (is he more serious, or more lighthearted? in what combinations?), though those can be fun discussions, as we try to build headcanon to fill in spaces that his own statements don’t or can’t. I assume we will still have those discussions. I can’t imagine that he’ll ever tell us which side of the bed he prefers to sleep on, for instance. That is the point of those discussions for us.

For him, it’s different. The point for Armitage is rather that tweeting is a way for him to influence and take over public constructions of himself (of which fan images of him are one case). Tweeting may make him less mysterious, and fans here or there may learn things about him that turn us off or even displease us. As he populates his persona with content, we may discover that our constructs were mistaken or even wrong to a greater or lesser degree. This doesn’t mean that nothing changes in Armitage — and I suppose I should add here that growth only occurs through change, something that’s true for both him and us. But the point is that by tweeting, he’s taking the step of choosing to populate the construct with his own content.

In this sense, it seems, Armitage is planning to start to steer his identity in public in more active ways than before. To say: I am this person (and not that one). I, Richard Armitage, am going to take an active, visible role in shaping the public construction of who Richard Armitage is seen to be. I can think of multiple reasons why this was a good decision for him, both personally and professionally. But in my opinion, his decision to do this is also good for us — because it is a concrete reminder to us that as much as we might like to do so, we don’t decide who Richard Armitage really is.

Only he can do that. Only he has all the information. And him tweeting is a good reminder of that, in that it demonstrates that in the end, he is the one with the information. I applaud his decision to underline that both for himself and for us.

~ by Servetus on August 25, 2014.