What we have here is a short film about Rob Gronkowski made by Bruce Weber, who recently photographed Gronk for DuJour Magazine. You might as well take that last sentence as a trigger warning.Gronk, who has made ebullient shirtlessness into something like a belief system, is who he is. Weber, who should not be confused with the immaculately coiffed man who coaches Kansas State's basketball team, is who he is, and if his name is less recognizable, he has been successful in a way that ensures that most everyone in the western world is familiar with his work. Weber is, among other things, the unofficial author of Abercrombie & Fitch's vintage horned-up n' hairless aesthetic. Weber is to black-and-white butt photography what Stephen Spielberg is to childlike wonderment; it is both his stylistic signature and primary artistic preoccupation. This, in other words, is a pairing that was a long time coming. That it was predictable makes the result no less insane.At the center of all this, snuggling Golden Retrievers and being splashed by a team of bikini-clad models and pretending to read books and dressing as a literal gladiator and doing healthy doses of faintly Leni Riefenstahl-ish black-and-white calisthenics, is Gronk. He is as endearingly, impenetrably simple as ever, answering questions from a flirtatious interviewer wearing a Gronk shirsey—while sitting shirtless in a pool and cradling a puppy, naturally—with his usual circular Gronk koans. (SHE: "What are you most looking forward to about the offseason?" HE: "Getting back to the training.") As always with Gronk, there is not a great deal of complexity to mine, or many subtle shades of anything.Weber's response to this challenge is to pour Gronk's 151 Proof Jungle Juice personality into one of those champagne coupe towers, and make sure the ensuing slosh is photographed properly. Most of Weber's signatures are here—his When In Doubt, Add Doggies philosophy is impossible to argue with, all other critiques aside—and photographing Gronkowski in a shirt seems, more than anything else, dishonest.This happens alongside some characteristically arch fashion-world commentary. The giggly equation of football to gladiatorial combat is, um, not underplayed, although it's kind of tough to tell whether Weber is playing with the fascist body-worship of Riefenstahl's propaganda films or just sort of doing what he usually does. It is hard to imagine a stranger two-and-a-half minutes of video related to Rob Gronkowski, although there is still plenty of time in this offseason for some iPhone video taken in a Senor Frog's to steal that crown.Anyway, at the end Gronk sails away in an inflatable raft with ten giggling models. That is probably not a symbol for anything. That almost certainly happened for real.