Gossip and durable or slippery fantasies –or, part 2

Continued from here (which was passworded for subject matter explained in the beginning of that post). This post may be controversial, but hopefully not because of the subject matter. Also, I will want to be able to link back to this argumentation easily at some point, so it’s visible. The next part of this will go back to passworded status for subject matter reasons. The comments policy is in force. Thanks.

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Divided into several pieces. II is framework that I needed to work through for myself — listing my assumptions. If you want to cut to the main descriptive assertions I’m making, on the basis of my fantasies when I think about Richard Armitage’s romantic life, skip to III.

Richard Armitage, quotation from video interview for the release of audible.com’s Classic Love Poems.

I. Topic

Everything I want to write about lately is so slippery, hard to grasp. The topic at hand: How does the hypothetical possibility of a breakup make me think about Richard Armitage? I do not know how to write about this. So I’ll try to build up a building for discussing it.

II.  Framework

Topic: Richard Armitage’s relationships as factor in my perception of his identity.

Quote from 2010.

From the beginning, I’ve been preoccupied with the question of who Richard Armitage is, with all the ups and downs associated with that. I wrote a bit about how we can know about identity, and my surprise at how controversial that turned out to be led me to outline a series of levels of knowledge as derived from highly problematic sources, with the goal of discerning methods things that might be gleaned, which turned out to be even more of a problem for some readers. As I learned, the question of defending identity via the fandom crush is the source of vicious battles, which makes the whole enterprise of saying “who Richard Armitage is” among fans highly fraught, as each of us builds our own version of the man, tied to our own needs and desires and connected to our own egos. Nonetheless, in an attempt to answer my own questions I ventured onto the terrain of interpretive biographical writing, and I have tried over the years to isolate fan beliefs about Richard Armitage, explore their origins, and analyze them critically, such as the question of the shy, serious sex symbol.

Relationships (family, friendly, romantic) are a component of the picture: both the question of the person with whom one is in a relationship, and the quality of the person while in the relationship. I do find it interesting to know who someone’s friends are: a man is known by the company he keeps. To me, Armitage’s continuing friendships with Annabel Capper and Jo Bendy speak well of him. In comparison, a romantic relationship itself isn’t in any way necessary for me as part of a picture. I got along without this knowledge for several years, and in contrast to many fans I’m not an optimist about romance. Maybe it’s that I’m happily single myself. I remember feeling surprised when a fellow fan wrote that celebrating the crush’s relationship was important to her. Her point-of-view had never occurred to me. At the same time, whether I need it or not, if I have information in that area, it definitely figures into my picture of who someone is.

I’ve been skirting writing about this for a while. My first attempt was about a relationship that if it ever existed, was in the past by the time I wrote about it, and therefore safer, although the post has been used to indict me and associate views with me that I have never held. When it started to be important to me to discuss the more actual aspects of the question, I tried to write about it as a serious of speculations that I had based on information of dubious reliability and fantasy tropes that were incorporated into my thinking. There was nothing I could say about the topic that was not heavily objectionable to someone — sexuality being an essential piece of how we define human identity at present — and eventually the effort to defend myself wore me down, although I did not stop thinking about it. The latest apparent shift in Armitage’s life in this regard has definitely left me revising my fantasy life.

Statement from 2005, one with a lot of interpretive baggage.

 

III. Narrowly: Who is Richard Armitage + relationships ?

I’ve spent a lot of professional time pondering the question of what people are like whom I will never meet because they are dead. Sometimes those people have been dead for centuries, and as a historian, I try to fill in things I don’t know by reference to context. Things like social class, generation, gender behavior, culture, the subject’s experience, and so on can be adduced to fill in a picture. Naturally, I bring that equipment to my attempts to understand Richard Armitage. Since fandom is an identity-building game (see framework, above), when I don’t have much evidence, I fill in pieces that relate to my own identity. There’s a reason for every descriptive element I include below — but of course I am not saying this is how he “is.” Rather, this is how I have reasoned him to be, using evidence at hand, and naturally, the things I postulate have something to do with me — in that this is all based in part on my reactions to particular evidence. It means something because it means something to me, and it could mean something else to any other observer including Armitage.

I muse upon a few different variants on my view of Richard Armitage’s personality, alternatively, depending on what’s come out lately, or what I’ve rewatched, or what he’s said in interviews, or the mood I’m in. There are also a few pictures of him for which there are evidence, but which I don’t really entertain seriously in the framework in which some fans put them. For instance, one that doesn’t speak to me, however affectionately meant — is of Armitage as dork. This term implies foolishness and social ineptness, and if I want a descriptor for his often juvenile jokes, his silly side, or his intense absorption in things, I use one that doesn’t imply he’s also out of touch or regularly behaves ridiculously. That was fine when he was still almost a teenager; it doesn’t suit my needs as an adult. I prefer to think of him as playful, geeky, a joyful connoisseur of the absurd.

It should also come as no surprise that all of the infantilizing pictures of Armitage that overlap with the “dork” image rankle with me: the ones that imply that he can’t take care of his own interests, needs mothering from someone other than his own mother, can’t protect his own professional interests or needs someone to pick a new agent for him, seeks protection from fans, and so on. In my world, by the time you’re thirty at the latest,  you own your own face. So for me, any bad decisions that Armitage makes, any faults he displays, are fully his responsibility at this point. And the evidence that really turns me on both as a researcher and as a fan is material that reveals him to be highly competent — to reveal that he knows what he’s talking about, as he surely does.

To me, this was a particularly decisive moment in Armitage’s self description.

As an additional matter of context to show you how my own experience and identity play into these things: no adult male I’ve ever been close to or respected appreciates infantilizing treatment. So my Richard Armitage is first and foremost an adult; indeed, someone who’s been an adult since a time in his life where many men I know were still late adolescents. Every other assumption proceeds from that basic one: Richard Armitage wants to and is capable of taking care of himself. Ambitious in the measure necessary to advance in his professional life and a dreamer, he grew up in a culture that admires hard work but frowns upon open expression of the desire to stand out. Someone who didn’t fit in where he grew up but nonetheless eschews the tendency toward self-display, he embraced an immodest profession in a setting where modesty is king. For approaching three decades, his primary preoccupations have been a combination of artistic and professional. This is not to say that he has had no meaningful romantic relationships during time — I don’t know for sure — but rather, it’s my impression that his priority has been to keep himself free of obligations — however attractive they might be — that would hamper or prevent him from participating a project he really wanted to pursue.

At the same time, there’s a tension — the one created by the sort of dreams Armitage would sometimes like to be dreaming about himself, the one in which certain ties could be attractive: the alternative futures where he has children, where he lives out in his own life, in his own preferred variants, the sort of love that he sometimes imagines as part of the lives of his characters. When he says in interviews that he wants to have a family someday, I find myself thinking that (a) his known history so far, along with his professional trajectory, suggests that he’s not really the family-man type and / but (b) he still think there’s time: someday. “Someday” thinking of this type could reflect sincere wishes that always lose out to a busy lifestyle without room for children or a focus on home, or saying it can be a ruse to hide sentiments in a different direction, as it’s still not really socially adept to say one doesn’t want to reproduce. Saying you don’t want to feel that you must work to support a family is a pretty clear rejection of a certain kind of obligation. Even so, sometimes people say they want to settle down and are concerned that they haven’t; sometimes they say they want to settle down and believe it, but never really step in that direction; and sometimes they say it because they know it is expected of them. And in Armitage’s case, saying he never wanted to have a family or children would be really hard on the fantasies of a lot of fans. He must realize that, as well. Here we get to the source problem — it’s very hard to judge the sincerity of any statement in a source that is created in part to sell something or hide the truth. That doesn’t mean that we can know nothing, but rather that we can known is highly provisional.

From the 2013 Hobbit: TDOS press round.

Finally, desire plays into the question of relationships: it’s hard to imagine that someone who can look so intensely at a screen partner, that anyone who’s such a champion smolderer, does not know that feeling of extreme wanting, perhaps at times with frustrating responses, in his own life. Remarks Armitage has made about difficulties with fidelity and thinking that the chase is more interesting than the actual conquest feed into this perception of mine, as well as his statement a year or so ago about how we might think we should have a calm sort of love, but we leap head first into immoderate love, that this is the mode of experience, the rush, that humans desire. It seemed fair to assume to me, based on his remark about fist-fights, that Armitage has experienced his own share of immoderate love. His statements about himself as “moody” underline this possibility for me as well. He’s clearly influenced by a strong emotionality, and thus seems to me to be capable of transferring infatuation into love that is intense at the beginning, if not always sustained.

This post has a couple more parts, and I’d like to keep the discussion segmented — so please comment here about things discussed in this post. If you’re waiting for more, it’s definitely coming.

Continues here.

~ by Servetus on November 1, 2017.