Most years I watch one football game, the Super Bowl, and do so with a group of friends I have known for decades. I could not join them this year but took in the game anyway. When my friends and I once joked about working together, my title for our imaginary firm was easy for them to come up with: “VP In Charge of Criticism.” Though time has helped me grow beyond temperamental snark, the game remains a target-rich environment
This year was no exception, but I will hold my comments to one aspect of the commercials. (The fact that advertisements “win” by being a story themselves regardless of how pathetic they are is so altogether nuts and vacuous that you can imagine even Don Draper’s outrage. Do not the common values of alcoholism and philandering mean anything anymore? Or must we all suffer under this quasi-patriotic nonsense?)
Anyway, this year a majority of the ads included some famous person (or many famous people) trading in on their art or their glory days as an athlete to sell goods and services. (This is not new, obviously, although the predominance of “stars” this year looks notable.)
In many of these ads, the narrative was this: You get famous by being stupid. (Kate Mckinnon’s cat says “meow” and she hears “mayo” (as in mayonnaise) and thinks her cat can talk and we follow her “talking cat” as it goes on a meteoric and viral rise that includes speaking engagements and even arriving at a “global summit.”) Because McKinnon is gifted the punch line of that ad “time to pound some milk” (after the cat loses its fame) comes as a chuckle, maybe the only laugh in all these otherwise mirthless commercials. But mostly everything includes a wink-wink meta-narrative that pretends to make fun of celebrity even as it wants to buttress the flimsiness of fame, accelerates runaway materialism, and congratulates itself on being able to prostitute idolatry.
It is not all meta though. I mean if it feels like a stretch to call anything here “clever and deep,” as next-day “let’s look back on the commercials” YouTube videos (no doubt produced by the current version of Don Draper) invite us to do, there is one unironic and even unifying message that comes through from the parade of famous people—Ben Affleck, J. Lo, Matt Damon, Tom Brady, Jack Harlow, Michael Cera, Scarlett Johansson, Dan Marino, Martin Scorsese, David and Victoria Beckham, Jennifer Aniston, David Schwimmer, Tinay Fey, Jane Krakowski, Glenn Close, LL Cool J, Lionel Messi, Jason Sudeikis and many others—we watch shill for a phone company or an insurance brand or someone’s chicken nugget: I am for sale.
You know me. Trust me. Laugh with me. My best work is behind me. Buy from me because under all this hoo-ha you know that like you, my art and reputation and sense of self can be purchased. Because I can be bought, I am credible.
Should seriousness and integrity be the hallmark of “the big game?” Probably not.
Could a culture of seriousness or integrity generate this day? Hard to see how.
At the parade too, shots fired.