Q: When will Richard Armitage’s fandom reject his victimhood narrative? A: When Richard Armitage stops feeding it to us

It’s a bit hard to remember now, but regularly for the first five years I was a fan, there’d be fandom-wide flames. (There weren’t quite so many platforms then, so it was hard to go out of the way of them; it’s much easier not to notice them now, and the “mute” or “block” options on many of the newer platforms also facilitate not seeing things that make one uncomfortable.) There were different types of flames, but the initial impulse of many of them went more or less like this:

Fan A: Richard Armitage ____________________” [insert somewhat less than laudatory statement, like “looked tired at that event” — I remember a truly heated fight about that in 2013]

Fan B: “How can you say that?” [Vigorous defense of Armitage, often via an attack on the first fan]

or

Fan A: “Richard Armitage said _______________” [in Fan A’s view problematic thing]

Fan B: You’re obviously an idiot because you don’t understand what he really meant.

[For instance: I remember a bitter flame on tumblr about Armitage’s feelings about his beard in the summer of 2014, I think]

Now, I’m not talking about vigorous discussions here, or informed conversations (“he meant x” vs “he meant y”) or discussions that included close reading of actual statements and quotations of remarks attributed to him — I’m talking all-out fights, with threats and flouncing. Almost everyone got caught up in it from time to time. I certainly did. A long-time fan even coined a term for the tendency to attack other fans (not disagree with them — attack them) who didn’t share the same rosy view of Richard Armitage: APM or “Armitage Protection Mode.”

I wrote at great length about these “fandom identity battles,” noting that it was not typically possible for the fan to criticize or disagree with Armitage (and at that time, he didn’t have public social media, either), because he had the status of the crush. If something were wrong with the picture, it couldn’t be the person who generated the picture who had the problem, and it certainly couldn’t be one’s own picture that was the problem — the anger got displaced onto other fans who disrupted the picture instead. Hence the many flames. Observing all this (like Jas Rangoon linked below — make sure you check out that link if you haven’t read that piece), I was essentially of the viewpoint that these fights were generated by difficulties we were experiencing in accommodating new statements Armitage made to our picture of him.

Eventually, however, APM grew to cover a broader territory than just intrafandom disagreements. It also incorporated a clear strand that involved the strong insistence on the part of some fans that Armitage was a victim — of his management, for instance, or his stylists, or even of other fans (or of me, specifically, at times). This mood led to one of my favorite blog editorials of all time.

Armitage seemed aware of some pieces of this fan discourse about him. I assume that it popped up in his correspondence, too, as fans sent him creature comforts. At times he mused upon the protectiveness of his fans, calling us “motherly” or joking about how we’d go into battle at his back. In 2014 he was met at the stagedoor with throat remedies, and when he referred to it later, he seemed to want to brush it off.

So I had a tendency to think of Armitage as a different entity from our pictures of him. I spent and spend a fair amount of time thinking about fandom issues, and I’d long had a theory that Armitage’s attractiveness to many fans lay in a dual relationship. It wasn’t just that he was talented and attractive (though he certainly is), or that we admired him; it was that we identified with him or something about him. There was something about the mental or emotional profile of the typical Armitage fan (woman) that saw something of ourselves in him. I had always wanted to write about this, and filed a few drafts, but rather than developing it now, I’ll just outline it here as a moment for discussion: It was Armitage’s apparent vulnerability — his boyishness, his obvious discomfort in early interviews, his tendency to say things that revealed how unpolished he was — that women identified with. It didn’t hurt that he often played — and excelled at portraying — humiliated characters. And as his career did not take sudden, drastic flight into the stratosphere, despite changes in his demeanor, the feeling that he was being unfairly treated by the industry flowed into this identification. Women are typically more open than men about our feelings of being overlooked, under-appreciated, passed over; we tend to be more aware of our own humiliations and willing to express ourselves about them. To me, this also explains on some level the fact that Armitage has never attracted a large male following: men may feel humiliated, it’s true, but they don’t identify with humiliation or under-appreciation as an interpersonal or social experience in the way that women often do.

Now — Armitage has periodically referenced what he sees as his struggles with his career or dealing with his career himself. I typically accepted what British fans said about these statements — that they reflected a culturally typical modesty or self-deprecation. Some of them have been honest or disarming, as when he told greendragon that auditioning was awful and he’d had to play a mental game with himself to get through it. Sometimes that seemed to fit well, as when he stated that when he had to drive his car to the Spooks set, he’d get there early so as not to seem to be bragging. At other times, it didn’t fit well. I’m thinking of the times in 2010/11 when he was quoted as saying that he was trying to get through his career with the least amount of talent possible, something UK fans at the time told me was extreme, even taken as self-deprecation. Or the uncut version of the interview with David Stephenson, which includes remarks about him taking roles that Rupert Penry-Jones didn’t want, to the point that the interview ends up reassuring him slightly. Or the rather sardonic remarks at the end of 2016, when asked perhaps one too many questions about possible roles, stating he was there if JK Rowling wanted to call. I don’t deny that we fans invest these things with meanings — but that’s always the case. No trope works universally, even if things like “standing in back” seem obvious.

And tropes have unintended consequences. There’s a weird dynamic here, and we saw it at work today. It’s not unique to Armitage, of course; I run into it all the time in other places. The speaker tries to defuse potential criticism ahead of time by implying he has been victimized for saying something similar in the past.

tweet since deleted.

I suppose the emoji indicates that Armitage is joking here. But if so — why were exactly no comments in response to it joking? Probably a third of all the comments that responded to Armitage’s tweet spree this morning concerned this one and almost to a tweep they offered some kind of reassurance (mostly variations on: everyone has the right to an opinion, or you are not dumb, but with a few people saying they wanted to give the people who told him that a talking-to; this is another regular tendency, with fans saying that if Armitage deletes a tweet it’s fans’ fault — something I’ve been speaking against for years without success).

My take on this is that if it’s a joke, it’s a passive aggressive one that traps the listener into agreeing with the literal sense of low-esteem it projects, because it’s very hard to think of any way to respond to it in social media that isn’t sincere. You can’t tweet, “you’re right, shut up, laughing emoji” in response to this. (Or maybe you can, but I certainly wouldn’t.) There is no way that Armitage could have thought (especially after more than four years on Twitter) that this would produce anything other than what it did produce — a flood of reassurances. (It’s also obvious that he doesn’t have any doubts about his right to make the tweets, as his comments during the Brexit vote indicate — I’m thinking of his — now deleted — comment about how acting pays the rent and people who disagree with him should unfollow.) As soon as I saw it, I knew what the responses would be. So either he wanted those responses, or he was willing to accept them. Now: I’d be the first to say that someone who says something s/he knows is controversial doesn’t always desire the controversy to ensue — sometimes it feels like there are things that need to be said. But there is also a sense in which one says something and thinks “let the chips fall where they may.” I accept that there are consequences to what I say. This is the opposite of that. He wasn’t willing to accept the responses, because he deleted the tweet about two hours later. For him, the conversation was over.

I know that the recipient of self-deprecating speech is supposed to laugh or feel reassured that the speaker is not claiming power or attributing it to himself — but that never happened in this case, so if that was the intent of the communication it failed completely. But if self-deprecation is supposed to reassure us that Armitage’s political opinions are meaningless or don’t matter, it’s a dodge here. He wants to speak about politics, but he doesn’t want to deal with the consequences of political speech. It’s a distasteful pattern that makes us think we shouldn’t care about things that we should care about, and deeply. Self-deprecation might work as a technique for minimizing one’s power in a conversation in some settings, but in a setting as hierarchical as this one, it’s really not possible for Armitage to say he has no power. In fact, he has an audience because thousands are hanging on his words. So there’s another contradiction — I want to speak, but you shouldn’t take what I have to say too seriously even though the entire reason for you wanting to be on this platform with me is that you take me seriously. More fool you.

But what should we care about? He deleted all of those tweets, and then said (paraphrasing) “now for something completely different” and offered us career news. So — we weren’t supposed to think what he had to say was so important, but now he offers us information on what we are most interested in as fans, generating serious vertigo: “Enough of that — now about ME.” So even if the self-deprecation worked here, he completely undermined it and created the opposite effect. He is the powerful party in the conversation; he is the person who shares the information.

And then the topper, when fans began one of their (I’m excluding myself here, I don’t enjoy this, but many, many do) favorite activities: speculation on what the roles could be, he felt the need to intervene yet again with more “self-deprecation.”

I admit that I haven’t read all the responses to this tweet, but the ones I saw a few hours ago were running heavily as I would have suspected and he must know: you are good enough to be Bond, why are you running yourself down? This phrase has the feel of something he has said or heard a lot, but again: why self-deprecate? Why interfere with what fans are doing? He already has all the power, so why does he feel the need to take over the kind of conversation so many fans love and turn it yet again to him, leading to even more reassurance on top of it? I mean, this is one of his rare responses to what fans are saying, so why use it for this purpose?

It’s insulting to our intelligence and incredibly arrogant. Armitage has always behaved on Twitter as if the fandom were primarily about him, or as if it belonged to him. He’s refused to see it as a creation of the fans, and we had more evidence of that today. So I’d say to Armitage yet again: what we do or say is not about you. It’s about us.

For me: I always used to make fans more responsible for making him into a victim (of whatever: his advisors, other fans, people he worked with — as I argued above), because there often seemed to be a need in the air to see him as an underdog. But at the same time, he has regularly told the underdog story about himself (it’s strongly present in his early press). “Insecure actor attracts insecure fans,” so I said — but I always put that on the fans and our interpretations, and not on Armitage.

But the pattern’s getting hard to ignore. Maybe if Armitage would quit it with tweets that make himself seem like he’s been or being victimized, like he has at least a portion of self-esteem that corresponds to the actual achievements of his career, maybe if he would stop the regular projection of an aura of insecurity, fans would finally be able to leave this behind — or at least, we’d have less occasion to raise the topic. It’s difficult to indicate non-literal speech on social media. But after four years, it should be clear to Armitage that self-deprecation doesn’t work for him in the way it’s presumably intended. Indeed: it has the opposite effect.

~ by Servetus on December 15, 2018.