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| Chalamet and Hammer in Call Me by Your Name, (2017) |
This
is a post I started in Autumn of last year, and never finished. I seemed to have
swathes of free time on my hands as the UK went into a third lockdown, but I
couldn’t bring myself to keep logged in and staring at a screen. Work was
intensely, insanely busy – it seems people could cope OK with the first and second
lockdowns, but completely lost their minds during the third.
I
still can’t finish the post, at least not as I had originally intended to, and
that’s because of you, Armie Hammer.
Last
summer I read André Aciman's novel Call Me by Your Name, on which the
2017 film of the same name is based. Precocious 17-year-old Elio (played by Timothée Chalamet in the film version) is spending the summer at the family home on the
Italian coast, being a typical teenager, mooching around, being moody and
slightly awkward in his own skin.
When
his father’s graduate student assistant, 24-year-old Oliver (Armie Hammer)
shows up, Elio falls in love with him. Oliver is everything Elio is not –
older, worldlier, more at ease with himself. A
summer romance follows, ending when Oliver returns to the US and breaks Elio’s
heart.
I
loved the film. What could be a more perfect film to watch on a freezing cold,
dark January night than a love story set in sun-soaked Italy? I wanted to be
there, under the apricot trees and by the pool and in the piazza eating gelato
and drinking wine and smoking strong cigarettes in the sun. Both the film and the book sparked a nostalgia
in me, for the intenseness of teenage crushes, the pain of unrequited love
(Oliver is so off-hand and cool with his treatment of Elio) and for the heat of
endless summer holidays.
I
grew up in the UK, and we only went on holiday in the UK, so summer holidays definitely
did not involve swims in the pool, siestas and endless sunny days. They involved
rain-lashed caravans, walks and picnics, arguing about to watch on the telly
and my little brother doing things like getting lost on Bodmin Moor.
That
is where the first part of the original post ends. I had wanted to write about
my crushes on both Elio and Oliver, how their sweet romance had stayed with me
long after the film had ended and the final page of the book was turned. I’d
have to delete it now, anyway, if I had finished it.
Someone
asks you who Armie Hammer is, and you say, ‘He was in Call Me by Your Name,’
and they’ll say, ‘that gawky kid with the curly dark hair?’ and you’ll say, ‘no,
the other one,’ and they’ll go, ‘oh, is that his name! What else has he been
in?’ and you’ll think and think and think but you can’t remember anything else.
You
will have seen him in something else. You will have seen him in loads of things,
and not realised or have immediately forgotten. Credits include Netflix’s Godawful
Rebecca remake, Sorry to Bother You, (a film that I would describe
as a social satire body horror, where he plays a coke-addled, power-hungry,
nightmare...so,.. himself, then) Nocturnal Animals (I have seen that film twice
and have absolutely no idea who he is in it) Mirror Mirror, Wounds (Netflix
original horror, I had no idea what was going on 90% of the time, and I don’t
think the film did either) He was in The Man from U.N.C.L.E , J. Edgar and The Lone Ranger. Most notable is probably The Social Network where he
played the Winklevoss twins, and then voiced them again in an episode of The
Simpsons. While The Simpsons is now far from what it was in terms of
cultural reach and popularity, I feel that if an actor guests on there and people
still don’t know who they are, something has gone terribly awry.
In
a 2017 Buzzfeed article entitled 10 Long Years of Trying to Make Armie Hammer
happen, Anne Helen Petersen writes in-depth about his failure to make it into the
kind of Hollywood stardom other actors seemed to have achieved so effortlessly. It
should have been easy for him, after all. He’s 6’5. He's blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and handsome in the way of an old Hollywood era leading man like Marlon Brando or Paul Newman. He has a distinctive voice
that’s sexy, hypnotic in a ‘could read the phone book to me and it
would be fascinating’ kind of way. As has been previously quoted, if you were going
to cast someone as a fairy-tale prince, you’d pick him. Would have picked
him.
But
then he says stuff, unthinking, cringey over-sharing stuff, like how he had ‘certain
interests’ he had ‘smothered down’ (I paraphrase) because it’s not
respectful to pull your wife’s hair during sex, which seems to indicate he does
the old Madonna/Whore trope thing, where he separates women into the categories of the women you
fuck and the women you marry, and never the twain shall meet. Or that he allegedly
liked a bunch of BDSM tweets and follows young girls on his PUBLIC Instagram, like
some kind of digital-age Jimmy Savile. He even has the Jimmy Savile attire
down, being fond of a matching tracksuit combo, like he grew up on 1990s
Liverpool housing estate instead of the Cayman Islands. Except he doesn't even know how to wear one properly.
Also…no-one
wants a prince who allegedly declared, ‘I am 100% a cannibal’ and ‘I want to
chop off your toe and carry it around with me,’ as if a toe is not demented trophy hand-selected from Jeffrey Dahmer’s box of Precious Things, but some some kind of cute lucky charm
January
2021. Armie Hammer tweets that he’s ready kick the shit out of this year, and
demands that you kneel before him. Presumably so that he can kick you in the face
and trample over you while he’s on his way out to join Pinky and the Brain in
trying to take over the world. 2020 had been tough on him. He had spilt up with
his wife Elizabeth in the middle of the pandemic. Isolation with Elizabeth and their
two young children on a beautiful island was too much for him. Or maybe it was because
she had allegedly discovered he was allegedly cheating on her. While she was
pregnant. At least we didn’t have to hear them tunelessly screech a line from Imagine
in their fuck-off massive garden. Unless I have forgotten that he did that as
well, in which a double fuck you for that Armie Hammer.
He
talks about this time in depth in a video interview with Jonathan Heaf from
British GQ. He talks about his depression and how he’s having therapy and how
he’s trying to get in a healthier mind space (while drinking a martini at 10am,
always the sign of someone with a healthy approach to life. But I guess that
kind of thing is OK if you’re a movie star, and not, say, an unemployed heroin
addict living in a tower block and it’s a can of industrial strength cider instead of posh vodka).
There’s
something performative about his interview, something that feels disingenuous
and off. I went back and watched others,
they are kind of the same. He’s charming, often funny, and he can make an
otherwise boring story sound like a great adventure. It just seems like he’s
doing a ‘bit’, like it’s another role for him. Armie Hammer in the Armie Hammer
Story. Staring Armie D Hammer as himself. Written and directed by…eh, you get
the idea. He has a bit of a boys will be
boys vibe, the hapless fool who gets himself into drunken scraps, wearing his
charm like an asbestos coated scandal shield.
In
the same GQ video interview Hammer and Heaf, (who, by the way, looks like what you'd get if you ordered Ross Geller from Wish) recount a night out in the manner of some terrible douche-bag double act. It's this night out I think Heaf is talking about in the article linked below, where he wangs on about a mysterious photo which will NEVER SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY. What goes on tour stays on tour, eh lads? Waaayyyheeeey! Calm down, dickheads, you're hardly on tour with Mötley Crüe.
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Hmmm princely!
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I
urge you to read Jonathan Heaf’s GQ lickarse piece on Hammer, which basically makes it
sound like he’s obsessed with him and will do anything to impress him and be
his friend. Half the article is about how drunk they got and how ferocious Heaf's hangover is. It's a bit like the last minute A-level essays I used to turn in when I hadn't done the reading I was supposed to, and thought, 'Ah, fuck it, I'll wing it. They'll never be able to tell.' Heaf seems very pleased with himself so getting so drunk that he can't really remember the night before, which puts him at maturity level: 18 years old. He can't stop going on about it. Here’s a now deleted Heaf tweet about his buddy Armie:
,
You can decide for yourself if Heaf genuinely likes Hammer, or if Hammer has something on him so
bad it would make AC-12 blush, and Heaf is tweeting as some kind of desperate
damage control. The kind of damage control that eventually blows up in your stupid,
stupid face because you should have listened to your mother and left well
enough alone.
Heaf
seems to be like that kid at school who does things like drink tip-ex to get in
with the ‘cool kids’. I have a theory that ‘that photo’ is not of Hammer, but of
Heaf wrapped from head to foot in cling-film with some strategic hole placement
and Hammer’s balls in his mouth (IT’S A JOKE, please don’t sue me. Wait, can
you sue someone who has no money?)
I'll get off the topic of Jonathan Heaf in a moment, but I think it's this (and referring back to Anne Helen Petersen's Buzzfeed piece) that riles me so much. It seems you can get away with pretty much anything if you're male, white, good-looking and rich.
Not
long after that Hammer sent his January 2021 tweet, a woman, who I'll call 'A' (her name is public if you want to look it up) came forward, alleging that
she had been in a relationship with him since 2016, and over that time he was sexually
violent, emotionally abusive and a rapist. What had apparently started off as a
consensual BDSM relationship had turned into something very much not consensual.
Things had escalated quickly with Hammer.
A says that she ‘met’ the actor in 2016, when they exchanged social media messages.
She was then 20, he was 30 and had already been married for a few years to
Elizabeth.
Before I proceed, just
assume that I am saying, ‘allegedly’ before any of these statements from now
on, because Hammer of course is denying any of this took place, at least, not
in the way Woman A frames it did.
While
most of their ‘relationship’ seems to have been conducted on-line, they
apparently did meet and there was a night where A claims Hammer raped her for 4
hours and wouldn’t let her leave. This is an allegation that the LAPD (who I
have zero faith in) say they are now investigating. In messages between them, Hammer
seems to brush off the seriousness of her claim, saying that neither of them
thought to decide on a safe-word beforehand, and he didn’t realise she wasn’t
into it. This in some extreme cases becomes known as 'The Rough Sex Defence' - when men kill their female partner in bed and say it was 'by accident during rough sex'.
To some Hammer supporters, Woman A’s claims aren’t helped by further leaked messages that seem to
show she in was in touch with him years after this incident took place, but
this of course, is an extremely reductive view of the relationship between
abuser and the abused. I am sure there are people who have stories of how they
repeatedly sought out, and went back to, an abusive partner, for many reasons
that are often very complex. Just like the messages that Woman A released herself, there’s no evidence that the messages are actually between
them. You could say that Hammer leaked the explicit messages Woman A sent him 3 years after the alleged rape took place in an effort to discredit her version of events…
no-one knows for sure at the moment.
An added complication has been Woman A's attitude towards other survivors that have come forward, including racism. Woman A seems to say that this other woman is lying because she isn't Hammer's usual type (I believe she is Black) Let me be clear; you can be both a survivor and not a very nice person at the same time. I think it may also be possible that Woman A is struggling to come to terms with the fact she wasn't the only one, and therefore, she isn't special. Reading Hammer's alleged messages to the woman, and his MO becomes clear. It's the same thing over and over again; he can't control himself around them, they are the only ones that make him feel this way. To quote Dorothy Parker:
Lady, lady, should you meet
One whose ways are all discreet,
One who murmurs that his wife
Is the lodestar of his life,
One who keeps assuring you
That he never was untrue,
Never loved another one . . .
Lady, lady, better run!
Then
other women came forward; 2 ex -girlfriends, B, and C (again their names are public if you want to look them up) who made remarkably similar
allegations. That he would contact them on social media, tell a story about a sad
rich boy whose dad didn’t seem to love him very much and whose mother was a
Cayman Island Margaret White, waking him in the night to sprinkle oil over him,
shouting ‘the power of Christ compels you!’ This is how it goes down in my head, anyway, and it's not a secret that his mother is very religious. Hammer has talked about that’s
why she has never seen Call Me by Your Name.
From
what I can gather, there’s now at least 7 women telling this same story – B and
C, D who have made their names public and E, F and G who haven’t. He allegedly
called all these women ‘kittens’ (which I assume was so he didn’t have to
remember their all names, as there seems to be cross over between them), and
demanded that they call him ‘Daddy’. I know ‘Daddy’ is a thing, but just no. No
thank-you.
Then
there was a theory floating around that Hammer might be a serial killer after remains were found in the Joshua Tree National Park, not far from where, at the
time, he was helping his friend build a hotel. As a side note, I cannot
imagine Hammer being any use at building or DIY, and have a vision of him begging to be allowed
to use the tile cutter, and his mate saying, ‘no, you can’t use the tile
cutter, you know what happens when you use the tile cutter…but you can screw in
the light bulbs if you want, though, yeah?’
Aside from the fact that the remains were of a woman missing since 2019 (so, before Hammer was working on the hotel), the
serial killer theory seems to stem from the extremely violent and graphic messages
that Hammer has allegedly sent women. They include choking them to blackout; wanting them to cut off pieces of themselves and cooking it for him; opening their skulls and fucking their brains; smashing their bones, drinking their blood and violating them in another thousand revolting,
stomach churning ways that would even freak Patrick Bateman out.
He hits some of the markers on the now
discredited serial killer profile checklist:
Over-bearing,
religious zealot mum (if it's not one thing it's...)
Cold,
unloving or absent father
A history of
setting fires and animal abuse. He apparently set fires at school and there's a message exchange with him and Woman A where he says he almost choked his dog to death because he was thinking about her and went into some kind of trance.
I don't think Hammer is a serial killer, (if he is, he's late to the game as most of them start before they're in their 30s) but I’d love him to take the
Bob Hare psychopath test and see what that throws back.
What
this all amounts to, is, fuck you Armie Hammer. Fuck you for ruining one of my
favourite ‘escape for a few hours’ films. Fuck you for ruining the book on
which it’s based. Fuck you for getting so many undeserved chances that you
repeatedly fuck up. Fuck you because you’ll probably get away with this and we’ll
have to watch you play some version of yourself yet again. Fuck you
for being an abusive, violent, manipulative arsehole who won't take any accountability for anything you have done. Even if you did apologise, I wouldn’t believe you.
It would be as sincere as Ted Bundy blaming porn for the reason he murdered so
many women, as hollow as a chocolate Easter egg, as empty as bucket with a hole
in it.
Also, I hate the fact you like some of the same music I do, so thanks for ruining those songs for me too.
Also. You have a fucking stupid name.
