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If you were feeling annoyed by an ageless man who couldn’t ever figure out his intent and implored to come out of retirement three times, filled with tremendous enthusiasm in the sport, but selfishly has a reputation of holding teams’ hostage, then you aren’t so plagued to discern that Brett Favre is coming back for his 20th season.
At last, the weariness of FavreCenter has been canceled and no longer is seizing all the national attention on ESPN, as we, the Americans, can breathe a sigh of relief. He is, however, the worldwide nuisance in sports, known for changing his mind each summer to steal the limelight and be described as the most prominent athlete in the country.
But it’s now apparent that the announcement of Favre returning for potentially an incredible joyride isn’t surprising, realizing eventually he’d inform the Minnesota Vikings of his sudden comeback and finally put an ongoing saga to rest. A typical Minnesotan believed all along that Favre’s storyline forged a publicity headline, as the most disturbing anecdote heard in the media.
For all the wishy-washiness in the last three off seasons, the self-centered psyche of the three-time MVP burnt out an entire country and the customary un-retiring/retiring rites were exhausting. But now that he has finally pondered and is willing to engineer the Vikings as a grandfather and mentor, a vital component for his younger teammates, it’s easy to suggest that Minnesota has emerged as favorites and can actually win the Super Bowl.
When he arrived to the state where he is verified as the savior, therefore the expectations are immense next season, fans and executives were optimistic on Favre’s return.
Although he’s an old-timer with a stubborn mind and has the mannerism of an elderly man, the gray-haired veteran divulged that the Vikings lured him, a bottomless core in position of capturing a title. By now, he knows the possibilities of celebrating in triumph and exiting the game as an elite quarterback at the very top.
“As we were diving on that last drive it seemed like it was destiny—for us,” Favre said. “I was so close, so close to getting these guys to the Super Bowl.”
It’s very fascinating that he’s verified as the president of football and could literally even run for governor of Minnesota. If Jesse Ventura, the Body, was elected, then Favre odds of being sworn into office aren’t impossible.
As soon as he arrived to the Land of 10,000 Lakes, where the senior-citizen of football declared his citizenship ever since converting to a purple uniform and leading the Vikings damn near to the Super Bowl, he walked off the private jet and thousands greeted him.
For the first time since he was harassed badly and battered by the New Orleans Saints tenacious defense, Favre joined his teammates and suited up for workouts, not skipping out on the most rigorous task in football. For once, we didn’t need another charade in the midsummer for which anyone with common sense clearly knew, without even forecasting, that he was coming back.
For once, we ignored the frenzy and tried purging all the hoopla discovered in newspapers and on websites, fully understanding the modus of an elusive gunslinger who has taken us on the wildest folly. Of all the idiocy, he misled us not once, not twice, but three times, and we were stupid to believe a confused Favre.
This time, however, it was altogether a different scenario and we had good sense by not buying into the justification, when we refused to believe that he was ready to retire, return to his home in the rural area of Mississippi and relax on his couch to watch football. But as expected, he is willing to test wills again, contend at the highest level and take the physical abuse on Sundays.
Now that is a man with a lot of guts and fortitude in the late stages of his aging career mentally, of course. From a physical standpoint, nonetheless, he’s prepared for the challenge and the old timer is still fun to watch. It’s easy to envision the 40-year-old quarterback, who is suddenly the new 30, hurl spirals deep across the field and connect with one of his talented wideouts in a prolific receiving core.
“I owe it to this organization to give it one more,” Favre said.
Well, at least he stated that briefly without epically creating uncertainty en route to the regular season. What’s more notable is that he acts like a drama queen, with his diva-like antics and places absurdity on a somewhat impaired image. For years, he has been pampered and, as a result, his self-centered and egomaniacal ways, unhinged his legacy.
The cynics were disgusted and angry with Favre, whose public frolics were broadcasted all over the world. But he never realized how a mesmerizing career as the most accomplished quarterback gradually shrunk for selfishly skipping out the offseason, teasing franchises and fans with all the unnecessary hilarity. He said the most recent decision was “very tough.”
How tough?
“This is a very good football team—the chances here are much greater than in other places. From that standpoint, it was always going to be easier (to return). Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I could play as well as last year. In my 18 years previous, I never played that good, period. I was amazed. But as well as I played, by far the best in my career, it wasn’t enough (for a title). It just goes to show, all phases need to be hitting at all times. I need to come back and play well, be a great leader and do all the intangible things that are more than statistics."
“And then, part of me said it was such a great year, it would be easy to say, ‘Hey, I can’t play any better, why even try?’ The other part is, ‘Guys are playing on a high level. Why don’t I go back out? Why not try again? You know you have a good football team around you.’ The expectations are high here, as they should be. I can’t make any guarantees. I’m not here to set any records. People say, ‘You can do this, do this.’ I’ve done it all. There’s nothing for me to prove.”
In retrospect, though, Favre’s wonderful legacy is clouded by all the comeback pledges and endless drama during the summer months.
As he ages and declines, it’s rational to believe that mentally and physically playing late in his career is wear and tear on his debilitated body. The worst-case scenario is that he sustains a life-threatening injury. But the best-case scenario is that he leads the Vikings to the Super Bowl, which is why coach Brad Childress coaxed the inspirational leader to return for what is likely his final season.
That’s what he says.
He simply delayed the organization by withholding on the announcement to miss out on training camp and minicamps for his self-indulgence and laziness, but his return can punch a ticket to the Super Bowl in Dallas, despite entertaining a tough schedule and playing within a potent NFC North division, including a powerful conference in general. The Cowboys are stronger. The Packers are rising. And, well, the Saints are marching in as defending champs.
In the most popular sport here in the States, Favre is the most beloved athlete and he still plays the game brilliantly, despite throwing ill-advised passes that results as interceptions or incomplete passes. Not long ago, Favre was beaten in the NFC Championship Game, and gingerly arose from the turf standing on his own two feet, but limped over to the sideline and had to recover from painful hits in a theatrical overtime loss against the Saints.
Still, to this day, Favre has the precision and muscular arm-strength to deliver downfield passes in a high-powered offense, once again reclaiming the starting job as quarterback. All his contemplating inconsiderately halted the opportunity of the inconsistent Tarvaris Jackson, who was promised the starting position until Favre made his announcement. And also, there is a disillusioned Sage Rosenfels, now expected to hold the clipboard and wear the earpiece.
Last year, he tried rehabbing his injured shoulder and opted to retire. But when it healed, he came back. This year, he has rehabbed a severe ankle injury. And guess what? He’s back. It’s hard to assume that he’ll last an entire season, before feeling pain in the damaged ankle.
“There’s nothing on me 100 percent,” Favre said. “There was nothing on me 100 percent last year or the year before. But the surgeries, I think, have made me a little better. Playing 309 straight games, I can’t complain.”
He believes that the capabilities of him extending his NFL-record streak of consecutive games played is possible. But as the Vikings monstrous defensive Jared Allen and kicker Ryan Longwell, implored Favre to return for one more shot, he acknowledged the team and brought aspiration to a Super Bowl contender.
If explosive running back Adrian Peterson plays with urgency and controls the ball with excellent ball security, it takes pressure off of Favre and will probably even create options. In the deepest receiver core, there is Sidney Rice and Percy Harvin, who has sustained migraines significantly. With the advantage of a talented core, Favre can continuously exploit his crafty throwing motions and showboat his powerful throwing arm.
Without him, the Vikings weren’t even a playoff contender. But with Favre, the Vikings are immediate contenders and can win the hardware in Dallas.
Is anyone else weary of the media’s hunt for retouched images to ridicule? A little more than a week ago, blogs were abuzz over unretouched photos of Jennifer Aniston, outtakes from a 2006 cover shoot for British Harper’s Bazaar, in which the ever-tan actress looked less sun-kissed than sun-abused, a mere human not yet buffed to a celebrity gloss. Two weeks earlier, the pressing issue was whether Jessica Simpson — whose career has lately consisted of public proclamations of her newfound détente with her zaftig figure — was airbrushed to slimness on the September cover of Lucky. Speculation also raged over Katy Perry; did she receive similar digital liposuction at the hands of Rolling Stone? And let’s not forget Ann Taylor’s recent Photoshop debacles: On more than one occasion, images that appeared on the company’s website were of such bizarrely inhuman proportions that the models’ legs looked like Pixie Stix, and their waists appeared only slightly larger than their arms. “e agree our retouching has been overzealous … ”a spokesperson from Ann Taylor replied, after the website Jezebel slammed the aberrant images.
The issue, many critics of Photoshopping claim, is one of social ethics and emotional sensitivity. Retouched photos set an unrealistic bar for suggestible young girls, and therefore cry out to be exposed. Jezebel editor-in-chief Jessica Coen recently argued that the site’s relentless attention to modified photos is motivated by the need to defend impressionable minds: "very day a young woman somewhere sees one of these overly polished pictures for the first time … and has no idea that they're not real ... And maybe she doesn't have someone in her life to point out that this is complete and utter bullshit." (Though it seems improbable that this young woman with no inkling that fashion magazines are fake is also aware of and has access to Jezebel.) In France, legislators have pushed for a law that would require a disclaimer for any digitally enhanced photograph. The Australian government recently announced plans for a similar footnoting policy, and Britain’s equalities minister Lynne Featherstone called for a “Kitemark,” or warning label of sorts — a proposal that has impelled hundreds of Girl Guides (U.K.’s Girl Scouts) to sign a petition in support. "I am very keen that children and young women should be informed about airbrushing, so they don't fall victim to looking at an image and thinking that anyone can have a twelve-inch waist. It is so not possible," Featherstone has said.
Retouched images also spike page views, and not because of an attentive desire on the part of readers to protect vulnerable teens. The endless cavalcade of before-and-after shots is an outgrowth of the voyeurism, gossipmongering, and schadenfreude that fuel our celebrity industrial complex. People want to see actresses in all their wrinkled, full-figured glory for the same reason they want to purchase tabloids replete with pictures of A-list love handles. They want assurance that stars are just like us, which is to say imperfect. “It's making me less self-conscious about the lines on my own forehead, between my eyes, around my mouth,” wrote a Jezebel commentator, buoyed up by the subpar Aniston images. Another exclaimed: “Aha! It now seems that sexy-messy-sea-hair is also all smoke and mirrors. Phew. Now my own sea-hair seems a little less like a disastrous personal affliction.” And so, because human nature dictates that what inquiring minds really want to know is that stars are as unprepossessing as their fans, magazines and websites continue to traffic in these photos.
But how many adult women actually take the images in fashion magazines — artificial as they are, feats of makeup and lighting and camera angles, even without retouching — at face value? “Our readers are not idiots,” Christine Leiritz, editor of French Marie Claire, told the New York Times last year, “especially when they see those celebrities who are 50 and look 23.” Most of us who read fashion magazines don’t feel we’re confronting reality when we see a photograph of a grown woman with preteen thighs. (We certainly see enough countervailing tabloid shots to know exactly what celebrity thighs look like.) If such photos enrage us, and often they do, it’s not because they damage our self-esteem, nor — let’s be honest — because we’re constantly fretting, like some earnest psychologist or crusading politician, about the emotional repercussions for adolescent girls. Our interest in altered images is not purely moral; it’s also aesthetic. We believe that a picture should convey, “objectively,” without undue intervention, what the lens originally captured. But these days, come to a fashion, consumer, or celebrity magazine with this quaint puritanical notion in mind, and you’re bound to be disappointed: Many contemporary images are illustrations masquerading as photographs, cartoons composed with a computer rather than a pen.
What’s galling is the patent disingenuousness of the whole murky enterprise. Only when an image has been egregiously botched — as with that Ralph Lauren ad last year, in which model Filippa Hamilton resembled a shrunken apple-head doll, her face far too ample for her emaciated body — is there any admission, often in the form of a suspiciously fulsome apology, that a blatantly renovated image is not au naturel. Magazines and advertisers want it both ways: They want the credibility afforded by seemingly documentary photographs, but they also want the sexy, buzzy aura of a stylized illustration. They want to have their photo, so to speak, and Photoshop it, too.
And why shouldn’t they? The age-old game of glamour creation, from Renaissance portraiture to Playboy centerfolds, has always been one of frank enhancement. Retouched pictures simply claim the traditional prerogatives of illustrations: to exaggerate, accentuate, and improve upon their subjects — basically, to lie. For much of the last century, models and movie stars in fashion magazines and advertisements were often rendered as drawings or paintings. In The Girl on the Magazine Cover, journalism professor Carolyn Kitch explains that magazines were “dealing in ideals rather than reality,” and the vaguer contours of an illustration “could represent both a specific type of female beauty,” as well as more general “model attributes,” like “youth, innocence, sophistication, modernity, upward mobility,” etc. Of course, illustrations also appealed to their vain subjects, who were usually portrayed as idealized versions of themselves. In the ads of illustrator Gil Elvgren, for example, the women are libidinous fantasies — a busty girl-next-door seductively rides a carousel to sell Coca-Cola; another, for whom busty is an understatement, shills for a Certa mattress. His pinups were even more outlandish in their homogenized well-endowedness. Not surprisingly, Hollywood starlets were eager for Elvgren to elevate them with his magic paintbrush. Similarly, Alberto Vargas, the famous creator of Esquire’s Vargas girl and numerous Playboy illustrations, was favored by many Golden Age movie stars (Betty Grable Jane Russell, Ava Gardner) of his day. The melon-breasted, small-waisted sameness of his images invented something of a new pulp genre: physiological science fiction.
Much like our latter-day Photoshop humanoids, the artwork of Elvgren, Vargas, and their peers rely on elements of caricature, fixating on erotic body parts, the breasts and hips, as well as on secondary sexual characteristics — big eyes, smooth skin, all the alluring physical accessories. These illustrations obviously amplified and emended the actual women who modeled for them. Were they, however, photographs that had been digitally manipulated, their distortions would rankle and disconcert. Looking at them, one can’t help wonder why we resist accepting, or even celebrating, a retouched photo for what it is: an open fiction, a candid fantasy. If we could ditch the idea that these images bear any resemblance to reality, viewers might not feel conned or played for fools.
Seen and appreciated for what they are, magazine images might gain in artistic vibrancy what they lose in everyday authority. The truth is that most retouched photos fail as aesthetic objects, not because they’re deceptive, but because they’re timid, feeble, and inhibited. Constrained by their origins as photographs, they stop short of embracing full stylization. They force themselves to walk a very fine line: romanticize without being preposterous, improve upon nature without grossly misrepresenting a famous physique with which viewers are familiar. When an apparently hipless Demi Moore graced the cover of W last year, readers blanched. Likewise when Gwyneth’s Paltrow’s head appeared oddly detached from her body on the May 2008 cover of Vogue, giving her an upsetting alien-from-outer-space vibe. What were the editors thinking? That we wouldn’t notice? And yet perversely, artificial as these images are, they’re actually not artificial enough. It would be better, perhaps, if art directors just went all the way, publishing, without apologies, pictures of incarnate Betty Boops or Jessica Rabbits. Too many magazine images nowadays are neither fish nor fowl, neither photographs of integrity nor illustrations of potency. They’re weird in-between creatures, annoying and unsettling.
It’s unlikely that magazines will take up overt illustration again anytime soon. And it’s even less likely that Hollywood, given its pathological obsession with youth and its despotic publicity apparatus, will deny itself the option of touch-ups. So let’s get real ourselves, as viewers. Look around. We know perfectly well what women look like. We know when images are spurious — no paternalistic formal disclaimer needed. Let’s cope with our image-drenched environment (by some counts, 3,000 ads accost us every day) by teaching young women (and men) to cultivate the same critical skills we urge them to exercise when reading, a more complex task than pointing gleeful fingers at graphic misdemeanors. The problem isn’t altered photographs; it’s our failure to alter our expectations of them.
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