Brett Favre is Harvey Dent: He was the face of the NFL

"You either die the hero, or you live long enough to become the villain."

                                                                          --Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight

When Bruce Wayne, accompanied by a Russian ballerina, sits down with Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes, at dinner in The Dark Knight, a conversation ensues about whether Batman is really the sort of hero Gotham needs.  The most insignificant of characters, the Russian ballerina, is the character who begins the debate and calls into question Batman's heroism, stating that Harvey Dent is the real hero.  The movie then continues to build on the premise that there is a difference between the heroes people want, need, and deserve.  Bruce Wayne agrees with the ballerina, confessing to Alfred and Rachel Dawes that Harvey Dent is the hero Gotham City needs.  

This whole idea that Harvey Dent is the hero Gotham needs is based on the fact that he does not wear a mask or make-up.  Harvey Dent does not hide who he is from the every day citizen.  Bruce Wayne views Harvey Dent as a hero who is open and honest and can inspire people to safely walk in his footsteps.  Bruce Wayne views the actions Batman inspires, from behind a mask, as dangerous to those ordinary citizens who try and follow his lead.  Citizens inspired by Harvey Dent pass the bar and fight crime through the laws of the land.  Citizens who follow Batman break the law and attempt fighting criminals while wearing hockey pads.  In other words, Batman inspires foolishness and Harvey Dent inspires real change.  

The thing is, Harvey Dent was never the white knight on the steed.  Batman wears a mask to intimidate and to hide his own fears.  The Joker wears makeup to physically display how much he scoffs at the rules of society.  Harvey Dent's blue eyes, blonde hair, and square jaw mask his corruption.  Justice is supposed to be blind and give everyone a fair chance.  Harvey Dent uses a coin, that's double-sided, to make all his important decisions.  This coin is how he got Rachel Dawes to fall in love with him, so why is anyone surprised when he starts using this coin not only as cupid's arrow but as lady justice's scales?  He is not a calm man who suddenly becomes reckless.  He is a reckless man disguised as a calm one. 

Harvey Dent's first scene in the film features a witness he is questioning holding him at gunpoint, but Harvey Dent doesn't frighten.  He doesn't even hesitate to act.  He punches the thug in the face and snatches the gun from the would be assassin's hand.  This move is a reckless one, endangering everyone in the courtroom, and yet it makes Harvey Dent into a hero.  He takes matters into his own hands here, so why would anyone be shocked to later see him take the law and people's lives into his own hands as well?  Harvey Dent was never who Bruce Wayne or a Russian ballerina thought he was.  Harvey Dent was always Two Face, like how a sculpture is already present in the marble, even before the artist renders it.

The Joker's first significant line is "that which doesn't kill you, only makes you stranger."  This line implies that no one is normal.  Otherwise, the line would have read "that which doesn't kill you, only makes you strange."  Harvey Dent is already strange, and The Joker aims to display this truth.  Dent initiates his relationship with Rachel Dawes through a fixed coin toss, and he punches a man at gunpoint.  He is a man of significant hubris, which is why he constantly makes a joke of free will with a trick coin.  He pretends to give people a choice, but really he's already made the choice.  Really, he's playing god, and in his world, freedom is a pretense, even for him. 

A coin with two sides reading heads is a metaphor that Dent's fate is decided, and he can't be the hero when his decisions are built on falsifications and corruptions of the truth.

So what does any of this have to do with Brett Favre?  

Today, Thomas Jones called Brett out for being a selfish teammate.  He accused Brett of isolating himself from the rest of the team, and he accused Brett of playing in a reckless manner that never took into account his teammates.  Thomas Jones centers this last argument on Favre's three interceptions in the Jets' last game against the Dolphins.  

I'm a life long Packers fan.  I'm a life long Brett Favre fan (despite what my letters might say), and I've never heard a teammate of Brett's accuse him of being a bad teammate.  I only remember how much Robert Brooks, Frank Winters, and Mark Chmura always liked playing with Brett.  They said so in interviews for tv, magazines, and newspapers.  They hung out at his house, and they hunted with him.  Brett never seemed like a guy on the sidelines who was distant from his teammates.  He was always laughing, grinning, picking them up, jumping into their arms, and cracking jokes with them.  He always seemed like one of them, and his coaches always described him this way.   The Brett Favre I knew in Green Bay would not have sat in offices away from his team, behind closed blinds, like the owner in The Natural.  

The Brett Favre I know would have been with his teammates, telling fart jokes and drinking stories, but then I remembered two instances from the past.  When Javon Walker and the Packers' front office were disputing his contract extension, Brett called Walker out in public; and when Aaron Rodgers was first drafted, there were rumors that Brett wasn't exactly enthusiastic to pass on any of his wisdom.  There's a scene in The Dark Knight where Batman sees Harvey Dent holding a gun to one of The Joker's henchman and tossing his coin in the air. Batman tells Dent, "he's not worth it," and continues to hold Dent up as the hero Gotham needs.  Before Thomas Jones opened his mouth today, had I already seen Brett Favre in an alley with a trick coin and a gun, putting himself ahead of his teammates?  Did I ignore what I saw because I needed a white knight?  

Before Rachel Dawes dies and before The Joker plays roulette with Two Face in the hospital, Harvey Dent hides the strangeness underneath his Arthurian exterior, but he battles with it.  His reckless anger and his fragile hubris show themselves in flashes, like the twitching of an eyelid hints at exhaustion.  

With half his face gone, Harvey Dent becomes too tired to keep suppressing the Two Face within.  He snaps and goes on a killing spree.  The last life his spree takes is his own when he falls to his death.  At this point, Batman decides to take the blame for Two Face's actions.  He covers up the scars on Two Face's body by turning the head so the world sees only Harvey Dent.  Batman's mask now hides not only his own fears, but the truth of who Harvey Dent actually is.  

When Brett Favre went to the Jets, he left Green Bay with scars.  He went to New York with something to prove--he didn't prove it.  The Jets started 8-3, but they finished 1-4; and Brett Favre's reckless throws inside the courtroom of one hundred yards are one of the main reasons they missed the playoffs.  Missing the playoffs cost Eric Mangini his job, which in and of itself would have rolled Brett's face over so that all we saw was Harvey Dent.  Mangini could have rode off on his motorcycle, into the night, with all the blame, but instead Thomas Jones, the Commissioner Gordon of this situation, couldn't keep the secret that Harvey Dent wasn't playing quarterback for the Jets at season's end--Two Face was.  

I don't know if everything Thomas Jones said is true.  I don't know if Brett locked himself away from his teammates, but I do know he didn't play well down the stretch.  I know he held too tightly to hubris and kept on chucking.  I know I'm glad Aaron Rodgers is Green Bay's quarterback.  I wish Brett had stayed retired.  I needed my white knight, whether I deserved him or not.  

It's not like Two Face is the only one with a coin to toss either.  

Of course, there is the other side of the coin that blames Favre's season on a torn bicep.

The Dark Knight @ a glance

I'll need to see the film a few more times before I start making concrete caveats about it, but The Dark Knight is a film that stretches its themes well beyond its genre, which is what good art does, and Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker demands that this "comic book movie" be looked at as art. His Joker is not a bank robber, a desperate man in need of attention, or simply out to foil the Batman; he is, as Alfred describes him, "[a man who] just wants to watch the world burn." This Joker's intention is to conduct a psychological study in how to create anarchy and see how many chaotic choices between life and death can the human psyche take before it pitfalls into madness. The thing is, this Joker is conducting his psychological studies without taking notes or writing doctoral theses. There is no end goal, but flame and smoke. Nothing.


Heath Ledgers's portrayal of the Joker takes the character well beyond the normal archetype of a comic villian. He is not motivated by past failures or revenge like the villians of the Spiderman trilogy, and he is not after control or power as the Scarecrow was in Batman Begins. Afterall, his greatest pleasures in the film are a result of Batman taking control from him. He seems happiest when Batman takes the detonator out of his hand or is able to rescue the hostages because it brings the Joker back to ground zero, where, as Yeats writes, "all the ladders start." The Joker wants to be at ground zero, so he can build his ladders, only to burn them once they begin to resemble some sort of order. He's not trying to go anywhere and that makes him scarier than any normal villian.

He's more Colonel Kurtz from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness than he is criminal: "There was nothing either above or below him...He had kicked himself loose of the earth." In fact in the Joker's last scene, the only thing holding him in existence is the rope Batman ties him up with. If not for that, then the Joker would be totally free, physically, as well as mentally. In other words, this Joker never fears death. In fact, he probably prefers it because the experience is completely unknown.

And while Heath's Joker hung upside down my eyes began to sweat. Here was Heath Ledger lighting the screen on fire, hanging from a rope that somewhat resembles a fuse, and I had smoke in my eyes. I don't know if playing this role unnerved something in Ledger's mental state. I'm sure case studies have been done, are being done, and will be done that will try and say playing this role was the death of him. Personally, I would assume something was already wrong, waiting under the surface, before he took part in this film. Either way it seems fitting that after such a performance his last scene features him suspended in air, not a part of this world and not a part of the next, which is where art exists, filling in the gaps between humanity, imagination, and God.

I feel one has to admire the man's daring to push himself to the brink, as selfish as that sounds, and his willingness to completely embrace a character forces so many questions that stretch beyond the pages of comic books: how do we deal with people like the Joker? what are we willing to give up in the face of something that goes well past evil? at what price is great art made? is there any way to keep one's moral boundaries alive and well in a world such as this? what's the difference between the hero we deserve and the hero we need?

We needed this performance, Heath, but I'm not sure we deserved it; and we may never understand how far you had to go in giving it to us.

(P.S. This movie seemed as much about Gotham City as it did about our relations with the Middle East and China)