Hello my fellow Wild Wild Westies! I’ve made a discord for this tiny little fandom so we can stay in the loop about incoming fanworks and discuss the show!
I just picked this WWW book up at Gen Con! Most of it is episode-by-episode essays, but it also has some information on unproduced episodes and a whole section of entertaining infographics.
When I say I was not PREPARED. I mean, I had seen gif sets of this clip before but I was NOT prepared for the AUDIO. Oh my god poor Artie!
The Night of The Death Masks really was Artemus's terrible no good very bad day. He gets betrayed, drugged, kidnapped, shot in the leg and then is led to believe he killed his boyfriend best friend!
The dropping the gun and then to his knees in despair, the terrible little "oh no's" and the way his voice breaks when he says "Jim". The closest we get to this level of sad before then I think is in Druid's Blood where Artemus is very visibly trying not to break down while Jim is seemingly gravely injured and comatose.
But what REALLY gets me in this scene is the sobbing, which is wild considering by that point Artie knows Jim isn't dead! A testament to how good of an actor Artie/Ross is!
I mean it's really difficult to get crying/sobbing to sound right when you aren't actually crying let alone look real and he does both. He's actually shaking and everything, you can feel it, I feel like some actors even today forget we cry with our whole bodies, and he does.
That's really impressive. Especially considering the fact that art hadn't exactly been perfected for TV or film yet. Male characters in particular considering how such intense displays of sadness were rare (unless somebody actually died) and even then it was kinda hit or miss at times. I'm just so impressed.
Acting (good acting anyway) tends to lead you to pull from real life experiences to put emotion into your performance. I can only imagine Artie just sort of, unpaused the emotional reaction he was having when he really thought Jim was dead in order to convince Stark and Co that he still believed it.
It would've been really easy for them to have played this scene for laughs. To let Artie play up the crying as a comedic bit, but neither Ross nor the director took that angle I really love that.
The emotional depth of Jim and Artemus's relationship is really well displayed in how this scene was done. Even if part of it was a ploy and they jump back into the action-adventure shenanigans right after. It's really well balanced, and in a time where it feels like a lot of TV writing has lost touch with when to be tender/intense and when to be funny this scene just really stuck out to me.