The Super Bowl's evolution from football game to entertainment extravaganza
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In just 50 years, the Super Bowl has become one of the biggest “shared experiences” in American culture, up there with attending religious services, voting in presidential elections and playing Pokémon Go.
But curiously, many of the tens of millions who tune in don’t actually want to watch football.
Perhaps it’s because the game itself has never been all that exciting, with the outcome rarely a close call. As a response, it seems the NFL has created a thriving, celebratory atmosphere around the game.
So how did a battle of gridiron gladiators become second fiddle to a flashy spectacle of singers, fireworks and advertisements?
The Super (boring) Bowl
The Super Bowl is generally super boring – at least, in terms of the typically lopsided score. The game is so boring that a rehash of all 50 of the past Super Bowls finds that the average margin of victory is more than 14 points. Only 18 of the games have been decided by seven points or fewer, while only seven have been settled by a field goal or less.
The first 20 Super Bowls produced only five close games, and criticisms of the lack of parity in the other 15 drowned out the excitement of the handful of close contests. The average margin of victory for Super Bowls I to XX was over two touchdowns. Sports columnists in the 1970s and 1980s dismissed Super Bowls as “hopelessly” and “unbearably dull,” “sleep-inducing” and “lacking high drama.” Even former NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle admitted that the day was “probably more of an event than simply a game.”
Still, by the 1980s, the Super Bowl had become a de facto American holiday. But much of the public remained indifferent about the game itself. For example, prior to Super Bowl XXI, one poll indicated that 40 percent of viewers didn’t even care who won.
The show must go on
Because of its inability to consistently guarantee a reasonably competitive championship game, the NFL decided to ramp up the production of a spectacle, with expensive – sometimes controversial – halftime shows and pregame showcases distracting from the football.
Super Bowl halftime performances started out as relatively simple affairs featuring university marching bands and faded pop stars. But as early as Super Bowl XI in 1977 – when the league contracted with the Walt Disney Company to produce a halftime show titled “It’s a Small World” – the NFL began to craft a new production template.
The 1993 halftime show for Super Bowl XXVII featured pop icon Michael Jackson, the first in a long list of high-energy halftime productions built around top musical artists. Megastars of all genres suddenly began to covet a Super Bowl gig. The headliners of these shows soon took their own steps to redirect the focus of millions of television viewers away from football and onto themselves, whether it was Janet Jackson’s infamous wardrobe malfunction during Super Bowl XXXVIII or Beyoncé’s Super Bowl 50 political statement. This year, the NFL will shell out US million to produce Lady Gaga’s halftime show.
The NFL’s schemes for pumping up off-field excitement rather than relying on the drama (or, more frequently, the lack of drama) on the field soon moved to other aspects of the event. The national anthem soon became its own highly produced and coveted gig, joining pregame fireworks and military flyovers.
Whitney Houston’s booming rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” for Super Bowl XXV, performed weeks after the U.S. entered the Gulf War, set a new standard.
Not everyone could live up to Houston’s example. At Super Bowl XLV, Christina Aguilera wilted in the spotlight when she forgot the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” stealing some of the postgame commentary of what turned out to be one of the closer games, a 31-to-25 victory by the Green Bay Packers over the Pittsburgh Steelers.
A commercialized holiday just like the rest?
The NFL’s strategic marriage to television has also diverted attention away from the game on the field. In 1967, advertising rates for a 30-second commercial spot cost a modest ,500.
In the years since, they’ve escalated to become the most expensive advertising time in the history of television. After 1985, in response to the huge impact of Apple’s legendary “1984” commercial, advertising rates soared to over 0,000 for a 30-second spot. This trend sparked the emergence of the “Ad Bowl,” an unofficial but hyper-intense marketing competition to produce the most creative and memorable television commercial targeting the Super Bowl’s enormous captive audience, which hit 111.9 million viewers last year. Within a decade of the debut of “1984,” advertising rates doubled to
You might have seen The Weeknd’s altered face on the internet lately – either bloodied and covered in bandages or transformed by faux plastic surgery. With the 30-year-old singer set to perform at the Super Bowl LV halftime show on Feb. 7, it’ll be interesting to see whether he continues the act before hundreds of millions of viewers.
The changes to The Weeknd’s face didn’t simply appear overnight.
Rather, they surfaced as a slow crescendo, as notes in a larger arrangement.
Initially, there were facial bruises at the end of his “Blinding Lights” music video, in which an all-night bender ends in a car accident. He sported a bandaged nose for performances on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” in January 2020 and “Saturday Night Live” in March 2020. Later that March, the bloodied nose and lips appeared on the cover of “After Hours,” his most recent album.
He took the performance a step further at the 2020 American Music Awards, showing up with his whole head covered in bandages, which worried some fans who assumed the they were real. When those bandages came off for the “Save Your Tears” music video, a face disfigured by excessive plastic surgery was revealed – a carefully constructed visage created using makeup and prostheses that made him nearly unrecognizable.
As an anthropologist who has been analyzing the societal implications of plastic surgery for over 15 years, I was struck by The Weeknd’s use of this medical practice.
What, I wondered, was he trying to say?
Initially, I’d assumed the bruises and bandages were a metaphor for The Weeknd’s struggle with drug addiction, a topic he has long explored in his music. He’s noted that, when scripting his music videos for “After Hours,” he was inspired by the film “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” in which writer Hunter S. Thompson, played by Johnny Depp, often hallucinates or spirals out of control.
However, another key emerges in the videos from the “After Hours” album. In all the videos, people are constantly watching him, whether it’s the crowd of stiff, masked fans in the “Save Your Tears” music video or the frantic crowd reaching out to grab him as he tries to escape at the end of “Until I Bleed Out.”
In both cases, he seems to be comparing fandom to an unsettling loss of privacy, one where his very safety is at stake. It’s not that he fears his fans will hurt him. It’s more a commentary on how his celebrity status makes him vulnerable to a prying gaze at all times.
In his most violent music video to date – for the song “Too Late” – the themes of plastic surgery and fandom collide. Two wealthy white women with bandaged heads find his severed head and swoon over it, before deciding to murder a Black male stripper so they can attach The Weeknd’s head onto that muscular body.
The racial dynamics of the video are hard to miss: The women seem to exoticize Blackness and reduce the body parts of two Black men to objects that give them pleasure.
People love musical performances – or art, more generally – because it’s pleasurable to soak in the talented work of other people.
In the celebrity culture of late capitalism, however, artists are finding it more and more difficult to separate themselves from their art: The show continues after the work has been published or the performance has concluded. Fans feel entitled to access all aspects of their personal lives – even their bodies.
Communication scholar P. David Marshall has written about the ways in which the public assumes celebrities are automatically open to – or deserving of – scrutiny thanks to their fame. When their privacy is invaded, it’s simply shrugged off as coming with the territory.
Some celebrities, like the Kardashians, lean into it. They’re willing to expose themselves in increasingly invasive ways – whether it’s through social media or reality television – because they want to exploit the symbiotic relationship between media exposure, wealth and power.
But other celebrities, like Lady Gaga, have been forthright about the ways in which fame has harmed their mental health. Musicians like Sia and Daft Punk have gone to great lengths to hide their faces and protect their privacy, making it part of their act.
By using bandages and prostheses to hide his face, perhaps The Weeknd is also telling us that parts of his life are off limits – and should stay that way.
The Weeknd also seems to be acknowledging the immense pressures that celebrities feel to conform to unrealistic beauty standards. Celebrity journalism can be particularly cruel when famous people fail to measure up, with the paparazzi making a fortune off pictures that demonstrate celebrities as vulnerable or imperfect.
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Feminist and literary scholar Virginia Blum has written about how celebrities are admired for their ability to transform and beautify themselves, and yet they also become canvases for harsh critique when it seems they’ve gone too far with plastic surgery or have aged ungracefully.
For celebrities, it can sometimes seem that there’s no pleasing anyone. By making those concerns with superficial beauty part of his art, The Weeknd seems to throw that mirror back at his listeners, asking them to reflect on the irrelevance of his appearance to his craft.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Alvaro Jarrin, College of the Holy Cross.
Read more:
Inspired by Kim Kardashian, a feverish legion of followers struggle to achieve online fame
In Brazil, patients risk everything for the ‘right to beauty’
Alvaro Jarrin's research on plastic surgery was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.
