OPINION:
It’s a mistake to take either offense or inspiration from the Super Bowl halftime show last weekend. In fact, if you met the contrivance from Hard Rock Stadium with anything other than detached bemusement, I would think you confused.
But, my, my, my were Americans a muddled lot on Monday. The commentariat (and, I would gather, your coworkers and family members) on the left and right were especially fired up, albeit by opposing narratives. And this hodgepodge of feelings, my friends, is exactly what the well-dressed, well-paid, poorly-intentioned people who produced the Pepsi halftime show meant to illicit through their spectacle.
Don’t fall for it. Understand it. For once you’ve comprehended the phenomena of the Super Bowl halftime show in its glorious, inoffensive stupid plasticity, Madison Avenue will no longer own your mind.
Of course, in order not to get taken in by corporate confidence men (and women), you need to get hip to their approach. The first thing to understand is that corporations — and the public relations and marketing firms who do their bidding like so many amoral puppy dogs — rarely leave anything up to chance and seldom act in anything other than the apparent self-interest of the bottom line.
Now do some reflecting on the program you saw Sunday night. Yes, Jennifer Lopez gyrated around in a hyper-sexual fashion; yes, she simulated sex, while moments earlier Shakira played out scenes from a BDSM fantasy. This infuriated conservatives, but it also, based on different interpretations of the unfolding fantasy, pleased some liberals, who swore they saw a 50-year-old Latina media mogul very much in touch with her sexuality, rocking-and-rolling, all the while ushering in a new more multicultural America.
There was something for everyone to get alternatively happy, mad, turned-on, turned-off, pleased, displeased, whatever. Mass appeal for as many of the little people as possible.
The underlying point, of course, was to get America to discuss and remember something — anything — from the evening. And so, we are each presented with a show that appeals (and we know it appeals since it was so thoroughly market-tested long before kick-off) to some aspect of our taste.
As a failsafe, of course, the event has to be provocative enough that it provides a few days pundit fodder, while not so grossly overstepping the bounds of impropriety that corporate sponsorship lags in the coming year (I honestly wonder what that would look like these days?).
Therefore, any nipple-slip like what “befell” Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake some years ago, or the current J.Lo qua MILF fantasy is calculated to produce the maximum sensation with just enough plausible deniability baked in so the event is discussed but no one (no one in charge of producing the show or taking part in it, that is) loses sleep, money or the satisfaction they provided Americans a show of real entertainment and cultural value.
Once you’ve figured this all out, the artificial sensationalism of events like the Super Bowl halftime show becomes incredibly boring. Sure, Jennifer Lopez and Shakira drip sex (or however that marketing phrase goes). But they don these outfits at the behest of a sex-less “braintrust” from Ogilvy, Fleishmann or Edelman. The charade is inorganic, meant only to satisfy some manufactured fantasy thrust upon the viewer, and that gets tiresome after a while. One is almost tempted to tune out of subsequent Pepsi halftime shows.
I encourage you very much to hold fast to remembering this feeling of fatigue — but especially boredom — when you next see an advertisement flit across the screen that agitates, titillates, irritates — whatever — your sensibilities. It was lovingly crafted to do just that somewhere in New York or California, where the purveyors of your fantasies and nightmares don’t really give a damn about your feelings one way or another; they just want to inhabit your brain from cradle to grave.
• David Bahr is managing editor of The American Mind.
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