Super moments they weren'tADULTERY, Vladimir Nabokov said, is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional. In the same sense, a display of salaciousness has become pop culture's tritest way to be controversial. Thus it is that, with the help of Justin Timberlake, Janet Jackson, heretofore best known for her laying-on-of-hands poster and a career mimetic of brother Michael's, has joined the MTV parade of mediocrities desperately pleading for notice their talents don't otherwise compel. In a pop world that, judging from the Super Bowl halftime show, can't distinguish between noise and music, and where crass is a far more marketable quality than class, the Jackson/Timberlake duet surely achieved what it set out to do. After all, an FCC investigation now impends into Jackson's TiVo moment. And so Jackson has, at the cost of the sort of exposure to which she's already proved herself more than amenable, won the kind of buzz-making publicity that money can't buy. And just as her new CD is about to be released. Britney, beware. Meanwhile, count it a good thing the FCC doesn't number among its duties the charge of protecting the public from an onslaught of tasteless and half-witted advertising humor, for if it did, some of the big game's sponsors would find themselves under investigation. The Super Bowl has historically been a time when advertisers paid top dollar to unveil their best pitch for their products. The spots themselves are supposed to be not dull-but-endurable sales jobs, but the creme de la creme of Madison Avenue image-making, vignettes that generate talk for their own artistry. Now try to imagine the executives at Frito-Lay calling their creatives in to preview the fruits of their marketing millions -- and being presented with an ad featuring an elderly couple tripping and tussling for a bag of potato chips. Assuming the captains of this chip-chomping industry aren't complete simpletons -- an admittedly treacherous premise in an area that has recently seen the advent of the dill-pickle chip -- how could they give the go-ahead to that mindless spot? And yet, bad as it was, that ad was high-concept advertising art compared to some of the others we saw. Now, groin humor enjoys such a time-honored place in the movies that it probably deserves its own Oscar category. And with the various pharmaceutical companies blanketing the airwaves with their rival remedies for erectile dysfunction, there can be little doubt that the male anatomy is much on the public mind. So perhaps, in a parallel universe where privacy and dignity are unknown concepts, the idea of helmet-haired drill sergeant Mike Ditka coaching one on in sexual matters is a product-selling notion. But how could anyone find Sierra Mist's spot of a Scotsman cooling his under-kilt equipment over a street grate anything other than a complete collision of the witless and the tasteless? Still, it was Bud Light that really outfaced taste in its offerings. Was a groin-chomping dog really its best attempt at beery humor? Well, perhaps it was, for one of Bud Light's other ads, which featured Cedric the Entertainer getting an inadvertent bikini wax, was almost as sophomoric. And certainly Bud Light outdid all other adventures in the asinine with the spot featuring the flatulent horse and unfortunate buggy-riders. Now, the Seinfeld episode it was pirated from, if coarse, could at least lay some claim to being funny, because the joke had a connection to the sit-com's storyline: Kramer had caused the equine indigestion by feeding the poor horse cut-rate chow from a warehouse store. But as Super Bowl fare, the gas-blasting beast was as crude as it was moronic. In advertising -- unlike, say, in bathroom humor -- a bit of subtlety is the soul of wit. Subtlety, however, is the offspring of intelligence. And it requires the assumption of the same discernment on the part of the viewers. Which is why, after watching the Super Bowl's puerile product pitches, a viewer was left with this question about the advertisers responsible for them: Can they really be such boorish dolts -- or is it just that they think the rest of us are? Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com. |
