The Awful Super Bowl Ads And The Death of Civilization
Or: The Storytelling and the Voyeur Cultures
For the last year or so, I’ve been teaching an advertising course. In spite of having no experience in the field and no expertise or particular interest in advertising, it’s actually a pretty good course and I enjoy teaching it — what I’ve been learning is that advertising is storytelling within an impossibly tight constraint (a 30-second TV ad spot where, for instance, you have to use all the resources of storytelling to sell a particular type of drainer fluid), and enormous human ingenuity has been dedicated to optimizing the form. The course I’ve been teaching this semester has been focused both on the history of advertising — on the turn advertising took in the 1960s from the effective but stultifying scientific school into the creative revolution (the story, basically, that makes up the overarching narrative structure of Mad Men) — and then on Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and how archetypal storytelling structures can be sliced and diced to create great, emotional ads even with only a few seconds of runtime.
So as an advertising professor, I was particularly interested in seeing what the best and brightest of the profession were producing for the Super Bowl and I was….profoundly shocked. Not only were the ads terrible but they seemed willfully terrible, like I must have been missing something and some other paradigm had taken effect that had nothing to do with storytelling or any of the precepts of advertising that I was trying to teach.
Let’s consider a few ads from the Super Bowl. These, by the way, made The New York Times’ list as the best of the bunch. I don’t have it in me to look at the bottom of the barrel. There’s Matt Damon and David Beckham pretending to be brothers because, I think, they kind of look alike, with the ad centering on the observation that football means something different in America than in England. There’s a seal with the face of the singer Seal on it and with even the characters in the ad giving up on it and agreeing that “none of this makes sense.” And then — alright — as a quick peek at the bottom there’s Pete Davidson in a skit vaguely involving aliens accusing Gordon Ramsay of not being sufficiently famous; and Charli XCX and Martha Stewart, honest to god, sitting on a couch and repeating “We listen and we don’t judge” for thirty seconds.
Let’s not forget the scale of what we’re dealing with here. The Super Bowl is watched by 128 million people. The ad spots cost $8 million apiece and each ad somewhere around $5 million on the back end. The advertising creatives are under tremendous pressure to produce. Each ad is overseen by god only knows how many executives from the world’s most blue-chip corporations — and the best anybody can come up with is Seal pasted on a seal in after-effects?
In order to try to figure out what’s going on, it doesn’t do, however, to point to the usual villains in American life — the problem isn’t overdone political correctness or even corporate fecklessness. There is, I am convinced, an intelligence somewhere in here — but an intelligence that defies normal understanding. And it is not that the advertising agencies in toto have lost the ability to create quality ads — Google’s “Dream Job” ad, the best of the Super Bowl, is a gorgeous and actually very sophisticated piece of storytelling. What is happening is the advertisers have chosen not to do that, and since the advertisers are rational, one can’t help but feel that they know what they are doing.
What is happening here, I believe, is something more profound — that we are shifting over from a storytelling culture to a voyeur culture. The storytelling culture is what anthropologists have been delighted to discover all over the world — a shared and (if Campbell is to be believed) apparently universal resonance of underlying story structures, the stories being, ultimately, metaphors for the growth from childhood into maturity. In a lovely example, the traveler Alexandra David-Néel visited Tibet in the 1920s and found the story of the Russian Revolution transmuted into something like red and white dragons sent by the Buddha to fulfill a series of impossible tasks but with Nenin the red dragon using a certain tonality of voice to convince the people that the uncompleted tasks had been fulfilled.1 The politics, and the facticity, of what had happened in Russia had disappeared; what was left, as it is in the crafting of legends all over the world, was the emotional core.
But something fundamentally seems to have changed in the human imagination. I doubt that anyone anywhere in the world right now is explaining the Russian Revolution as red and white dragons competing for the people’s favor. Why would they when the facts of the Russian Revolution are a Wikipedia click away? What has happened is that non-fiction has replaced imagination as the floor of all of our inner lives.
And what that means is that storytelling doesn’t have the same chthonic appeal — I can feel my students getting restless both while I’m waxing rhapsodic about the universal appeal of story structure and while they’re watching the examples of storytelling that are supposed to have such a deep appeal to them. What they respond to — in a way that I don’t — are images of glamor and cameos by celebrities. The appearances of celebrities, as well as the glimpses of dazzlingly-wonderful lives, seem to belong to a different paradigm — the paradigm of the voyeur where the thrill comes not from substituting oneself into the hero’s journey but from the odd, twitchy fascination of seeing a world that is very real but that one will never have direct access to.
In highfalutin terms, we can understand this as the ascent of what David Shields calls “reality hunger” at the expense of the elaborate dress-up of the novel and of more old-fashioned narrative modes. In more least common denominator terms, we can understand this as the rise of TikTok, Instagram, Facebook et al providing a Rear Window view into other peoples’ lives that is simply more tantalizing than anything that fiction can offer and is more available than in past eras when people could more easily guard their privacy and there was no similar cultural impetus towards oversharing.
The Super Bowl ads stink but they offer a quick-twitch satisfaction — there’s Seal’s face on a seal! there’s David Beckham and Matt Damon together and oh yeah they do sort of look alike! Probably somebody or other has crunched the numbers and found that this sort of referentiality — and the ease of it from a viewer’s perspective — simply moves more product than any kind of storyline. It’s a depressing set of reflections but it seems inescapable. Storytelling has lost its hold — and traditional cinema is dying right alongside books. What’s left is aesthetic snack food and voyeurism.
Sam Kahn writes the Substack
.For the life of me, I can’t dig up this quote — which seems appropriate for it.
What a true and disheartening reflection Sam. In many philosophical and spiritual traditions, the human imagination is often seen as deeply connected to the soul. I fear the conclusion this suggests!
"What they respond to — in a way that I don’t — are images of glamor and cameos by celebrities. The appearances of celebrities, as well as the glimpses of dazzlingly-wonderful lives, seem to belong to a different paradigm — the paradigm of the voyeur where the thrill comes not from substituting oneself into the hero’s journey but from the odd, twitchy fascination of seeing a world that is very real but that one will never have direct access to."
Feels very Brave New World. Bright glittering images. Social media as Soma. Lack of reading or intellectual curiosity. A wasteland of hollow mediocrity amidst the closing minds of America's youth. Perhaps the growing signals that we're preparing for AI/robot takeover. If not literally then symbolically.