Body Horror on Super Bowl Sunday
Why were all the commercials this year kind of gross??
For Americans, the Super Bowl is something sacred. To watch is almost obligatory, regardless of affinity (or lack thereof) to the teams or the sport at the center of the big match. Even those disinterested in the game's outcome often feel compelled to tune in. It’s a ritual deeply ingrained. Under normal circumstances, watching football makes my stomach sort of churn in the same way that my stomach churns during that one scene in Fargo where Steve Buscemi gets rammed into a wood chipper. Yet, fully aware of my own hypocrisy in offering my eyes to dialed-down bloodsport, most Februarys I find myself watching the Super Bowl with a house full of friends and enough buffalo chicken dip to feed an army of gluttons. Old habits die hard, I guess.
But, for those who oscillate between feelings of guilt and disinterest throughout the game itself, there has always been the promised solace of commercial breaks.
It’s funny that the prospect of watching Super Bowl commercials still holds any appeal to the 100 million+ people who tune in. I know that I am not alone in sometimes feeling like I am drowning in advertisements1 on every single platform I begrudgingly choose to interact with. But something about Super Bowl Sunday brings out the shameless consumerist demon that lives deep inside of me. Complicated feelings are shelved for three or four hours in favor of indulging in the creative pageantry and low-stakes surprises that each 30-60 second, multi-million dollar sales pitch has to offer.
But this year, I couldn’t help but fixate on the overarching theme of grotesque body-centric antics that bordered on nightmare fuel that seemed to dominate the commercial lineup.
The first that struck me actually aired shortly before the start of the game and featured Martha Stewart in a pair of “Glide-Step” slip-on sneakers. Situated in front of a perfectly manicured entranceway, the 83-year-old business mogul demonstrates how comfortable the sneakers supposedly are by breaking into a dance that tumbles headfirst into the uncanny valley. Her arms undulate as if they’re made out of rubber, and her feet “glide” through the air with each step she takes. Obviously, I don’t expect an octogenarian to perform their own choreography, but nothing about Martha moves in a way that feels real. The result is something deeply unsettling, a computer’s flawed attempt at generating organic human motion. Freakish stunt replaces any semblance of authenticity.
This was quickly followed up by the Cronenbergian depiction of singer-songwriter Seal merged with the body of an actual seal. This fleshy, flabby mass set among an otherwise idyllic and impossible backdrop proceeds to perform a modified rendition of “Kiss From a Rose” to a speedboat full of Baja Blast Mountain Dew enjoyers looking on from the distance. His cursed form prevents him from actually drinking the bright blue beverage, however, as he laments about the bottle slipping through his malformed flippers. There doesn’t even seem to be a concrete reason for the conception of this horrible creature, other than to shock audiences and vaguely associate the drink with a tropical paradise that does not actually exist. “None of this makes sense!” exclaims a chipper character known as the “Mountain Dude”.
This is not to say that the traditional fare failed to make its way to the pauses between plays. Harrison Ford, complete with an appropriately masculine German shepard at his heels, waxed poetic about freedom over footage of waving American flags, archival army footage, and snowcapped vistas in an ad for Jeep. The Budweiser Clydesdales made their obligatory appearance, dutifully delivering kegs of beer to the masses. Lays Potato Chips paid homage to America’s humble potato farmers.
But smack in the middle of all that, a dallop of Coffee Mate Cold Foam causes a man’s tongue to contort in unnatural ways, culminating with the muscle flying right out of the mouth as a display of celebratory fireworks explode in the distance.
Not one, but two separate commercials involved facial hair gaining sentience and emancipating itself from its celebrity owner, cancelling out whatever comfort that’s meant to come from Rocket Mortgage orchestrating a sing-along to John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads”.
Even my streaming service, Tubi, offered little reprieve. The commercials I’ve endured over the last year in exchange for otherwise unfettered access to sweet, sweet bottom-of-the-barrel mid-aughts reality swill have been used against me to fund a repulsive ad-campaign featuring a man donning a cowboy hat crafted from his own flesh.
All the while, I was frequently reminded of the frailty of my own body. Hims & Hers insisted that a direct-to-consumer GLP-1 prescription/subscription would both better my life and serve as a radical act of rebellion against the weight loss industry that it is a part of. Novartis reminded me that a breast cancer diagnosis lurks right around the corner for about 6 million Super Bowl viewers. If I am unlucky enough to be one of those individuals someday, they’ll be there to sell me the drugs I’ll need to stave off death. During the break between commercial breaks, the focus returned to men with twisted ankles and worn-down knees intent on wearing each other down.
Toward the end of the night, one last advertisement caught my attention – for Totino’s Pizza Rolls, of all things. Comedians Tim Robinson and Sam Richardson, alongside a few cute tweens, wave goodbye to a fluffy alien creature named Chazmo, set to proselytize Pizza Rolls to the universe at large. As he bids an emotional farewell to the Earthlings, the doors to his spaceship slam shut on Chazmo, snapping his neck and killing him instantly2. As the children scream in abject horror, the unphased adults shrug off the death as “a part of life”.
Perhaps being subjected to this is a form of twisted karma. Maybe one hundred million moments of collective discomfort is some sort of cosmic atonement, a price that we must pay for the animalistic pleasure of watchinga a handful of men bash and break.
It’s surprising to me that the Totino’s ad made its way to a Super Bowl slot at all, considering the inherently dark punchline lies in the comedians’ indifference to witnessing irreversible injury. I couldn’t help but see a little bit of myself. Maybe this commercial, seemingly self-aware, was trying to make a jab at how senseless the overall spectacle around the Super Bowl as a pseudo-holiday has become. Maybe it was meant as a sign, granting permission to lighten up. To abandon my sensitivities, to embrace the absurdity and the violence that is just “a part of life”.
I’m not sure. But I’ll think about it over a plate of Pizza Rolls.
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(Which, in fairness, is exacerbated by the fact that I am too stubborn and cheap to shell out premium subscription fees for my streaming media services of choice.)
An “uncut” version of the commercial available on YouTube shows an even more gruesome version of events, in which Chazmo’s eye pops out of its socket and rolls to the feet of the human onlookers.