“me + richard armitage”: what I own (part one)

Continued from here. Discussing ownership in the sense of “admissions.”

It also makes me queasy to write this because I usually talk in this way only with my besties. It’s a story of which pieces will be familiar to long-time readers, but with a little addition of my own commentary on things I have said publicly and why I have said them.

I started writing here because the effect that Richard Armitage had on me in North & South made me wonder about my sanity. I could not get the television show or the actor or the man out of my thoughts for about six weeks. I added North & South to a syllabus at the last second in January 2010 so I could justify the thing in terms of work. Preoccupation with him hit me on an unprecedented level. And yet, I always felt that the way Armitage made me feel, to the point of getting me out of bed some days, early on, was a good preoccupation. I was in severe distress when Armitagemania hit, and it sustained me then, got me going again, made a series of difficult life events bearable, and has revealed possibilities in my life that I hadn’t seen before. Maybe it hasn’t ended because I don’t want it to end — it brings me good things, and even some of the bad things it brought have been instructive and identity-building.

I had blogged before, so I didn’t think. I logged onto WP and created a new blog without much reflection. I needed a space to write just about Armitage (not necessarily to discuss him with others — if that had been my sole need, I’d have joined a forum) and I had found in my previous experiences that blogging was a way to associate with people who shared similar questions but not surrender control of what I could say. I had also discovered that I enjoyed writing about things in public. So the sole initial purpose of the blog was encountering my feelings. And blogging ended a long period of writer’s block, so I was grateful for that, too, and for the friends who found me and told me they’d had similar feelings and reactions to Armitage’s work.

“me + richard armitage” was thus birthed as the cri de coeur of a highly confused person — hence the intentional stylistic error I put in the blog name, something for which I’ve taken a fair amount of both friendly and mean heckling over the years. The blog is really about me, viewed through the prism of observations about Richard Armitage and my fascination with him. It developed. Gradually it became about self-acceptance and integrating the confusing and contradictory parts of my life and personality, about learning to admit the truth about myself. Then it became about (re-)finding and accepting a writerly identity. I’m not saying that I’m always 100 percent aware of my motivation, and I also didn’t really know anything about fandom politics when I started writing, either generally or in this specific case. The first readers who got in touch were friendly, warm, enthusiastic. I kept writing. Soon readers found me who diagnosed me with various maladies, including psychopathy, attention-seeking or wanting Richard Armitage’s attention. I kept writing. There are certainly problems with my personality, no one knows that better than I do, but in my view, blogging was never about needing Armitage to find me. It was about needing to find myself. As I was writing again, thinking again, then writing well and communicating, finding an audience became more central to my project. At that point, I think it is fair to say that I sought the attention of people interested in the topics I wrote about, and I expanded this platform to tumblr, facebook and twitter to attract more of them, but nothing about writing or looking for an audience was never about seeking Armitage’s approval or notice.

Indeed, as my Armitage besties know all too well, because they have had to talk me down from the wall many times, I had a horror of that possibility, although readers of all persuasions regularly raised it. Every now and then someone read something they told me they hoped Armitage would read. Every now and then someone told me she had printed something and forwarded it to Armitage. People have occasionally interpreted things he said in messages as directed at me and told me so. Sometimes readers joke about him reading the blog and deciding he likes me. I’ve also been told at least twice that I’ve been “reported” to Armitage’s agents for being mentally unbalanced and seeking to harm him. Those who want to reproach me leave comments that I don’t let through moderation in which they write things like “Do you really think Armitage would like it if he read this? He’d think you’re crazy and disgusting!” Answer: No. I never thought he would enjoy it; I thought most of it would make him cringe.

Admittedly: I never worried too much about what Richard Armitage thought of me (whether I’m disgusting or not) because I never believed he did think of me in any particular way or that I in particular was on his radar. During the second year I started getting messages from people pretending to be him, but the thought was so implausible that I filed them in the notional folder of an increasing number of weird experiences that fandom has granted me. And when people raised the possibility that Armitage reads the blog, I always, always discouraged the discussion because of the queasiness it gave me. My standard answers to the variations on the suggestion were — and I have stated these many times: Richard Armitage does not have time to read blogs about himself; if you think that you overstate the relevance that fans and their day-to-day activities apart from their willingness to do things that keep him employed, like spend money, play in his life; Richard Armitage is several orders of magnitude more important to me than I am to him; if he’s smart, he’s not reading this stuff; Richard Armitage is not in the audience for what I write; that way [contemplating the possibility that he reads] lies madness. Most readers have thankfully taken the hint that I didn’t find pondering the chance that he was reading especially attractive, and left the topic alone.

Even though I didn’t customarily think about Armitage reading this blog (or rather: I quite intentionally walled myself from thinking about it), I certainly experienced and experience my own share of conflict about writing so extensively about one person. It’s not that I write about him in detail — he is a public figure, and public figures draw comment. I may feel fewer scruples on this point than some people. I’ve worked as a historian for so long and we write controversially and sometimes unkindly about living people all the time. Rather, my conflict comes from the fact that I write about him in such personal terms. And it’s not about what I say about myself; I certainly have the right to be as open or closed as I wish about myself and my own reactions to things. But for what it’s worth, as a reply to the many criticisms of myself I’ve read on this point over the years — I think the fact that this blog often objectifies or sexualizes him or occasionally over- or (mis)interprets him is a much less serious ethical problem than the way that it mobilizes the entity “Richard Armitage” on my terms rather than his. Objectification and sexualization have clear commercial and professional benefits to him — whatever I think about my own moral status when I engage in them. Armitage’s status as the object of fantasy (among straight, white, middle- and upper-middle-class women and girls with money to spend) helps get him hired. It’s not entirely clear that the personal writing has the same benefits to him.

I haven’t felt enough qualms on that point to stop me from writing completely, because I don’t think anything I’ve written here harms him, although that assertion would be controversial to a number of readers who’ve assured me in no uncertain terms that some of it is. Moreover, it’s not either / or, as if writing this blog presented constant dilemmas between my ends and Richard Armitage’s, and it could be the case that some of my personal purposes and preoccupations suit him just fine. But I have always acknowledged that it is only a rationalization of my ethical conflict to say that this blog’s existence as a prominent location of news, commentary, squee, discussion, and meta-analysis about Richard Armitage and his work has benefits for him. I know I am doing something wrong, but it is good for you is not an argument that something is not wrong. As I have said many times, I am not Richard Armitage’s publicist, and writing to promote him lies outside my intent and responsibility, but publicity in the social media sense is certainly an unavoidable side of effect of what I do. At the same time, I am independent of him and I write what I want — and if what I want to write, if I want to write it badly enough, does not directly serve him, I am still going to write it as long as in my judgment it does not harm him. My name is the first one in the title, not his, and that was intentional from the beginning. I make the editorial and ethical judgments here.

Now, the admission. What I’ve said — Richard Armitage is not reading — is not entirely congruent with what I have thought from time to time. First, it would be foolish to argue that Armitage was completely uninformed about what occurred in the fandom, because his messages always reflected awareness of what fans thought and cared about. They were never written in a vacuum (hence my point above about co-ownership and implicit negotiation of content). Secondly, there were occasional moments where things were a little too weird for complete comfort on that point — Christmas 2011 was a case in point, although I discouraged recognition or discussion of that. But I could always talk myself out of it on some level, not least because I’d talk to other fans about what his messages meant and hear things they thought he was saying to them and be skeptical. Sometimes someone made an argument for why Armitage was specifically responding to one thing or other in the blogosphere and I could always find a rational alternative explanation that made as much or more sense. In the end, trying to derive specific personal messages from rather general missives was sort of like listening to the Delphic Oracle. As Obscura will tell you, the heroes of Greek drama were always misunderstanding those messages and making the wrong decisions based on them.

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Couldn’t resist putting this here — it’s Lucas North in Spooks 7.1 — with the Delphic maxim from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi tattooed on his lower abdomen. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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I think what someone else has called the pre-Christmas fan fallout points to something that I’ve wanted to ignore for a long time, which has been intensified by Armitage’s ostensible presence on Twitter. That is to say — the fact that he tweeted “no favouritism” doesn’t mean that he’s specifically reading this blog, but it does point inevitably to the fact that he was responding to a mood among fans that I was not responsible for creating — I wasn’t the only one who felt that way or even the first person who articulated it; it’s been percolating for months — but certainly for describing succinctly and articulating and proliferating and promoting.

That getting Armitage to respond to me hadn’t been my intent doesn’t really matter; what has changed is that I have now done something that I can be relatively certain Richard Armitage has noticed.

Next, how I feel about that and what I think it means. Me + entitlement.

~ by Servetus on January 26, 2015.