I love any naturally occurring occasion to gather with people to eat and drink, which is why I agree to sit down in front of one football game per year. I usually learn who’s who in the Super Bowl a few minutes into the first quarter, and this past weekend was no exception. I sat in my friend’s living room for the 2023 version and, per usual, registered the sporty bits not in the slightest. As far as I was concerned, the thing playing out between the ads and half-time show was an inscrutable ritual involving the measurement of distance and male-to-male touching, and the only competition worth concerning oneself over was whether the red pants team or the white pants team wore them better. Much more interesting and, ultimately, sobering was the cultural output of all the ads and the music and what they cumulatively explain about our broken state.
Admittedly, I’m ill-suited to serve as a critic of modern American culture. While I have an encyclopedic knowledge of the entire 1980s popular songbook, I know next to nothing about any artist who came of age after the turn of millennium, and, not having cable, I get my entertainment on ad-free platforms. On the other hand, perhaps my ignorance gives me more credibility. I’m like an alien observing this strange phenomenon called the Super Bowl, and so I may have a fresher view than my fellow Americans who swim in the stuff.
Companies first started using the Super Bowl to enhance their brands in the 1970s, and sometimes they did so to remarkably creative effect. To introduce the personal computer, Apple recreated 1984’s entire dystopian world, before shattering it and leaving us with nothing but its rainbow-striped symbol. The use of celebrities to sell stuff also started in the 1970s with Dick Butkus pushing antifreeze and Farrah Fawcett “creaming” Joe Namath with Noxzema. There’s nothing new under the sun about rich and famous people leveraging their riches and fame to make themselves richer and more famous, and by this stage it seems there’s literally no cultural icon who’s not willing to sell their name. (Google had no response to the question of which celebrities refuse to do ads on principle.)
I’m a huge sucker for pop culture nostalgia, which means I should have enjoyed this year’s Super Bowl ad iterations, especially, with all those playful nods to “Caddyshack,” “Clueless,” and 80’s heavy metal bands. They even evoked two of my favorite screen scenes of all time, “Summer Lovin’” from “Grease,” and the first big moment inside the RV from the first season of “Breaking Bad.” But instead those two commercials, in particular, repulsed me.
There was my beloved Danny Zucco (a k a John Travolta, net worth $250 million) leaning against a post and crooning, “I can’t believe it, it’s just fifty buuucccks,”
“Why pay more?” adds the guy from Scrubs.
“Paying more sucks,” adds the other guy from Scrubs. Poor man looked a sad fool, trying to hit the high note with his arm in the air.
And there were Jesse Pinkman and Walter White (a k a Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston, net worth $25 million and $40 million, respectively) degrading a brilliant script and their own magical personal chemistry to shill for a snack company.
This stuff is presumably meant to make us chuckle, feel grateful for the memories, and get distracted for 30 seconds from the debasement of modern-day life. Well, I didn’t chuckle, I wasn’t grateful, and they were each 30 seconds that only highlighted the debasement of modern-day life. Those ads broke an unspoken contract between performer and audience. Once upon a time, kids, talented musicians used to create musicals primarily for the fun of them, and gifted writers used to write difficult characters to illuminate aspects of the human experience that we can’t access without art. We bought the art that we were sold out of love. Now, I guess, with AI bots applying themselves to the production of art, commercial makers can now suck even harder on the tit of our prior cultural achievements, ad infinitum.
Another Super Bowl ad, though, I was at first inclined to enjoy. It starred Ben Affleck (net worth $150 million) moonlighting as a minimum wage employee of Dunkin’ Donuts. For the filming, Affleck actually worked the window at a Dunkin’ in Medford, Mass., employing an authentic “Southie” accent, surprising and charming real customers. Aw, so fun, to come upon a famous guy at the drive-through.
Then my thoughts turned to our real-world Dunkin’ Donuts outlet here in Great Barrington, which is not in a good way. It seems to go in and out of dire straits along with its staff. With an average hourly rate of $13.80 in Massachusetts, no one, of course, could possibly live on a Dunkin’ Donuts salary. At times of late, our Dunkin’ has been so understaffed they’ve had to post notes on the drive-through speaker in the middle of the day, explaining that staffing shortages had forced them to close. But Ben Affleck got away with explaining, “I’m not your typical Dunkin’ technician, usually they’re much smahta than me.”
The set-up of any fantastically rich kingpin masquerading as a member of our suffering underclass for a few hours ought in any just world to be seen as quite cruel, but by now we the people are so accustomed to this sort of condescension that it can reasonably come across as flattery, and Ben Affleck earning a few million to displace a minimum wage worker can be called entertainment.
As for the music, much—way too much—ink has been spilled over Rihanna’s half-time show, a lackluster performance which media types apparently found transgressively brilliant. In the real world, I—we, the 15 of us in the room—couldn’t get our heads around what the hell was going on. “Is she always this mellow?” we wondered. Then the women in the audience realized that she was pregnant. This also explained the parachutes everyone was wearing, which was a relief, because I thought she and some friends were going to jump off one of those platforms.
Ok, congrats Rihanna, but why agree to give a show in front of the world’s biggest audience if you’re not in a position to give it your all? Isn’t dialing it in a big f-you to the people who came to see you bring it? Apparently not. As the New York Times put it, the Super Bowl needs Rihanna more than she needs the Super Bowl. She’s a billionaire, but still she was there to boost the brand. As it was, all she had to do was take a sec to powder her nose to send her company, Fenty Beauty, up by 833 percent. She was selling makeup in the middle of a concert, and we bought it. (For the opposite of dialing it in, please see Prince at Super Bowl XLI in 2007.)
“I thought I meant somethin’ to ya!” Danny Zucco says to Sandy in “Grease.” I might say the same to the whole entertainment universe, on behalf of today’s viewing audience.
It occurs to me that the architecture of the Super Bowl evening was a money pyramid. She who stands at the top—according to online estimates, Rihanna is worth more than Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, Serena Williams, Brian Cox, Alicia Silverstone, Will Ferrell, Steve Martin, Adam Driver, and Jennifer Lopez combined—has earned the right to call a bit of shuffling around, strategic brand placement, and singing “an act of radical minimalism,” as the Atlantic put it.
(Then, among the celebrations of rank greed, appeared a series of advertisements not for chips or beer or insurance, but for Jesus, the good man who once said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.” I’ll just leave that here.)
Taking in the whole thing leaves this alien wondering if there’s any human motivation left apart from the accumulation of unnecessary wealth. I feel like Charlie Brown at the climax of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” crying into the ether: “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas,” read: life, “is all about?!”
The parts of Sunday night’s spectacle that aligned with Linus’ reassuring reply were the simple, just-a-man-and-his-guitar renditions of America the Beautiful and the Star Spangled Banner performed by Baby Face and Chris Stapleton. Those songs, sung without special effects, fancy outfits, or back-up dancers, can still bring us to tears. They touch on our deeper needs, on what makes us human, on what we all really want more of.
In the meantime, with bots taking over the work of creation, there’s nothing more to impede our corporate puppet masters from keeping us fully in their thrall. How far we have not come. Orwell would likely have been furious that 1984 had been pimped out to sell the personal computer, but I imagine he’d be a lot more alarmed by how much more 1984 we’re getting all the time.
