The Spectacle of the Superbowl

The two most-noted facts about this year's Superbowl ad blitz:

1.� A huge proportion of the ad time was devoted to e-commerce, i.e., retail web sites.� This seems at last to be the big year internet promoters have been predicting for the last five or six in a row.� That is, this will be the big year if the fantastic expenditure on advertising is followed by proportionally fantastic expenditures on-line by the public.� If not, well, it looks like a big waste of time and money, depending on your viewpoint.

2.� The most - because the only - controversial spot was the Nuveen Investments ad featuring the image of Christopher Reeve's head floating atop a vertiginously disproportionate image of a human body.� The premise of the ad's plot is simple enough and not too straining of imagination or belief: that at some future time injuries like Reeve's might be reparable.� However straightforward that might seem, the ad as a total phenomenon is as dizzying as the computer animation it presented.

First of all, it's amazing that any sane, sighted person watching this ad could possibly judge that it was an untouched image of Reeve walking.� But this is not due to incompetence, as bad as it looked: the distortion of the images must have been a carefully scrutinized corporate decision, to avoid misleading anyone that Reeve really was walking.� Nuveen Investments certainly wouldn't want to provoke the public reaction that would follow from such a cheap ploy.� Cueing the audience by not showing Reeve's head turn enough and making "his" "body" "move" in such an inhuman way was an attempt to produce an image of far future possibility, a sci-fi fantasy.� Nevertheless, the next day's news featured stories of crippled people across the country inquiring about the "prestigious institution" where Reeve had been fixed up (to which the true answer would be something like "oh, that?� Walt put that together on his iMac").

Nuveen's ad agency responded by saying they had carefully gone over this spot and did not foresee anyone concluding that Reeve was "cured." After all, Nuveen is an investment company, they said.

As usual, the ad people don't realize how true their words are, since they don't know which words are the true ones.

It's not amazing that people would miss the point of the animated Reeve-head and computer-"body," but it's astounding that any sane person would consider this a reasonable projection of the sort of organization Nuveen Investments is.�(Not that I'm surprised.� It's plausible to me that ad agencies are full of people that think: "Investment company.� Investment company.� What says 'investment company'?� Aha!� A medical fairy tale!"*)

Consider the ad as an image of investment capital (which it is). � As sponsor and represented subject of the ad, Nuveen Investments depicts itself as the creating agent of this future: it isn't doctors, nurses, technicians, and researchers that "cure" Reeve, it's capital.� That's the ideology of capital, after all: capital changes the world; the people whose work makes the actual alterations of material reality are incidental.� If capital can dream it, capital can make it happen; but to this credo must be added: what capital does not dream does not happen.�

These days, what capital dreams of most is e-commerce.� The huge investment in an as-yet unfulfilled technological project is discussed at length in the media, where pundits worry that the stock market is inflated and economists worry that the commercial potential of the internet is going to come too slowly.� The mushrooming ad budgets of new and immature dot-com companies (for instance, Amazon.com's holiday campaign, which nearly outspent earnings for the year) seem as incredible as - well, as Chris Reeve walking onto a stage.� But the internet will be everything capital dreams, and more. � Our level of general affluence, and the profit made from our participation in the rapid consumption of everything, fundamentally requires the creation of new forms of labor (to "add value" in the capitalist phrase or to be "exploited" in the Marxist phrase - both referring to essentially the same relation).� The internet does this with very little resource cost to capital.� By producing a form of labor that achieves nothing, capital creates the condition required for its continued subsistence, and we continue to play our vital roles as consumers and laborers.

Debord claims that commodity fetishism, the overcoming of use-value by exchange-value, reaches an apex of sorts in the spectacle, "where the perceptible world is replaced by a set of images that are superior to that world yet at the same time impose themselves as eminently perceptible."� Superbowl ads are the cream on top of the American spectacle.� Not only have the ads come to surpass in cultural significance the game which is their nominal reason for being, but the ads themselves have become spectacular self-representations of capital's deepest fantasies.� Reeve's walk replaces his perceptible, worldly presence with his presence for capital - his eminent perceptibility as a fantasy object, a commodity, the projection of capital's self-image.

And that's the stuff that dreams are made of.

Link to Doc Nagel's Ad Reviews Page

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Link to Doc Nagel's Den of Iniquity (satire page)

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Quotations from Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995).