The Show Goes On: A Sociological Take on Super Bowl LV
The Super Bowl is the most watched event on television in America, the hallmark sporting and cultural occasion of the American calendar. This year, Super Bowl LV was played between the Kansas Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on February 7, 2021. Why does a 60-minute game between twenty-two helmet-wearing men aiming to run 100 yards regularly attract 100 million viewers every year, and what implications does this have on American popular culture, particularly its interaction with the capitalism? In this essay, I will be taking a sociological approach to analyzing the Super Bowl LV, applying both the functionalist and critical perspectives of popular culture.
I will start off with the functionalist perspective, which asserts that popular culture can be explained primarily in its social functions in generating solidarity among individuals within large and anonymous communities. This approach has its origins in the study of religion, with French sociologist Emile Durkheim identifying three theoretical tenets in religion that foster social cohesion — collective consciousness, the demarcation of the sacred against the profane, and collective effervescence.
The Super Bowl exhibits all three of the Durkheimian theoretical tenets of religion. Firstly, pitting two teams against each other, in the Super Bowl as well as all cup finals, naturally leads to the delineation of the sacred and profane. The two teams represent populous cities from different regions of America (The Chiefs representing the Midwest while the Tampa Bay Buccaneers representing the East Coast) — hence most Americans can easily identify with and support one team over the other. The fierce rivalry is often dramatized with war-like imagery and hyped up with articles about past match-ups in the history. This serves to draw the boundary between us supporters vs them the opponents.
Secondly, there are easily recognizable symbols that create a collective conscience. One can think of the team logos, such as the Bucco Bruce pirate logo of the Buccaneers and KC arrowhead of the Chiefs, or iconic team jerseys with the jersey numbers of the teams’ quarterbacks — 15 for Patrick Mahomes and 12 for Tom Brady — that people pay hundreds for. Then there is the logo of the Super Bowl, the roman numerals LV with the Vince Lombardi trophy in the middle which is ubiquitous on marketing material conveying the gravitas of the event. Each of these have their own origin story: the Chief’s arrowhead design sketched on a napkin by founder Lamar Hunt, who also proposed the roman numerals, the Buccaneers’ name being chosen from a name-the-team contest in 1976 — and since then, these symbols take on a life of their own, being the iconic image encapsulating the teams and event that millions grow to love and identify with. Also contributing to the collective conscience are the numerous traditions that are layered on over the years: the Gatorade shower of the winning coaches, the phone-call from the President to the winning team, the pregame show, the memorable ads, and last but not least the extravagant Halftime Show. Each undoubtedly contributes to the cultural uniqueness and socially constructed meaning of the event.
Finally, watching the game creates a sense of collective effervescence, most definitely for avid NFL fans who feel their emotions rise and fall as their team advances and retreats on the field. Especially at Super Bowl watch parties, experiencing the nail-biting, tense moments with fellow diehard supporters, cheering in unison for Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes whenever they get to first down, euphorically hi-fiving each other upon touchdown, and witnessing history being made for the Buccaneers together — the shared experience of spiritual highs and lows as the game ebbs and flows, undoubtedly creates a collective sense of belonging and identity that can never be replicated. Upon winning the Super Bowl, Bucs fans thronged the streets of Tampa and ecstatically celebrated with each other.
This year, more than ever, the Super Bowl creates an imagined community far larger than the 25,000 socially-distanced spectators physically present at the Raymond James stadium in Tampa. Through the sounds of raucous cheers emanating from the packed grandstands and the close-up shots of every play, the 100 million viewers all over the country feel as though they are right in the thick of the action. To maintain the appearance of a packed crowd on TV despite the socially-distant, reduced seating capacity, Super Bowl organizers installed 30,000 fan cutouts to fill empty seats. This served to magnify the perception of collective effervescence for viewers on TV. While football fanatics may feel like their imagined community only consists of fellow diehard fans, I would argue that the imagined community extends to the whole of America. The Super Bowl has transcended a mere sports final to become an unabashedly American spectacle. By incorporating patriotic aspects to the event, such as the singing of the Star Spangled Banner by celebrity before the start of the game, the close ties between the Super Bowl and the US military, and the ads by American corporations, the Super Bowl arouses significant patriotic fervor. It becomes not just a celebration of the sport, but a celebration of America in all its extravagant glory. Whether you support one team or the other, or neither, partaking in the annual Super Bowl gives you an enhanced sense of national pride.
The Super Bowl functions as the cultural raw material facilitating social gatherings. 49% of Americans host or attend Super Bowl gatherings (that number was down to 25% this year due to the pandemic), which is surely more than the number of football fans. This is further illustrated by a survey on 2000 American adults which found that more people listed the social aspect (54%) as the top reason they attend Super Bowl gatherings than the game itself (49%). Super Bowl gathering food — chicken wings, pizza, chips and dip, and a generous helping of beer, have become cultural norms. Evidently, just like other celebratory days like Halloween, Fourth of July or New Years’, the Super Bowl has become a cultural phenomenon that catalyzes social events which allow people to bond together and converse about a common theme.
One cannot talk about the Super Bowl without discussing the Halftime Show — the extravaganza of music, dance and pyrotechnics where the football field is transformed into a live stage and back within a 30-minute interlude to the game. The Halftime Show is definitely a significant part of the Super Bowl as a cultural event — in fact, in recent years the Halftime Show has had a higher viewership than the actual game. Interestingly enough, the Halftime Show in its current form was actually only a recent development — up till the 1990s Halftime Shows primarily consisted of marching bands, and only featured pop acts from 1991. The turning point was in 1993 when Michael Jackson delivered a masterclass performance which became the most watched TV event ever (till 2017), and since then every Halftime Act tried to it in grandeur and pomp. Since then, the Halftime Show performer is chosen based on the criteria of popularity to a wide audience, genre and overall performance value.
This year, Canadian R&B star the Weeknd, whose real name is Abel Tesfaye, performed, and he was undoubtedly chosen due to the versatility of his music, from slower R&B sounds to upbeat party-style tunes. Taking the stage in one of the rare live performances of the pandemic era, he performed nine of his greatest hits, sporting his signature crystal-covered red suit, amidst an elaborate cityscape backdrop of glittering lights, bandage-clad dancers, and fireworks. The performance received rave reviews from celebrities and fans, with his performance video trending #1 on Youtube for several days.
The performance was clearly one meant to generate collective effervescence from the comfort of the audience’s homes — he focused intently on the cameras, had a minimalist stage set that was restricted to the stands due to COVID. He had a new iconic moment of rushing into an overlit labyrinth showing a confused, lost expression to a handheld camera as he scrambled to get into place for I Can’t Feel My Face, a sequence that sparked a flurry of meme generation on social media. Seeing tons of memes adapting that clip to a multitude of amusing circumstances on social media in the weeks after the Super Bowl — is a testament to the interactional approach to pop culture (though not within the scope of this essay), where well-connected influencers who generate and share memes on social media can propel certain cultural moments into ubiquitous fame. It is also interesting to note The Weeknd’s rise to fame was also heavily shaped through collective effervescence in a virtual scene: His top song Blinding Lights was catapulted into the charts by a TikTok meme gone viral — the “Blinding Lights” dance challenge — in March 2020 just as the world was entering quarantine. The simple but fun challenge of dancing to the song’s 30-second catchy opening went on to unite families, friends and celebrities throughout the summer, resulting in the song becoming Spotify song of the year.
The backstory behind The Weeknd’s Super Bowl performance is fascinating — Tesfaye was given a choice of performing at the Grammys or at the Super Bowl halftime, and he chose the latter — a decision that some speculate contributed to him being controversially snubbed for the Grammy awards. This illustrates the massive upside of performing at the Super Bowl in terms of promotion and recognition — being able to showcase your talent on the most-watched TV event in America. Upon being announced, The Weeknd jumped from #26 to the top 4 in Billboard’s Artist 100 rankings and has stayed throughout February, and his songs have been streamed 41% more after his performance. These definitely translate into commercial benefits: The Weeknd will be embarking on After Hours tour later this year, and would surely have wanted the immense boost in ticket sales that a Super Bowl halftime act normally accords artists (a 50% jump, according to previous years’ data by Stubhub).
This naturally leads to the second half of this essay, which focus on pop culture and capitalism. Capitalism is synonymous with America, and has become entrenched into the American way of life — for all its exploitative and un-equalizing reality, Americans willingly partake in the culture of capitalism in the form of advertisements and commercialization. The Super Bowl can be understood from the critical approach as well — how the ascendance of certain kinds of popular culture can be described by their ability to reflect and reinforce enormous economic and cultural power of the mass media society, a top-down transmission of cultural production that shows dominance.
Such extreme numbers of eyeballs watching the Super Bowl gives the event great potential to be monetized. This is the most lucrative opportunity for companies to advertise themselves to a massive and diverse audience. As a result, broadcasters charge exorbitant prices for Super Bowl ad slots, with a 30-second ad slot costing around $5 million, or $175 thousand per second. Companies running Super Bowl ads will then pull out all the stops to make the most extravagant, innovative and unconventional ad for the Super Bowl, given the huge potential to impact many would-be customers. They would even roll out elaborate marketing campaigns on the lead-up to the Super Bowl to generate buzz about the ads: such as Doritos inviting fans to create their own videos and vote on what should be shown during the Super Bowl timeslot.
[WATCH: All the Super Bowl LV ads]
A cynical viewpoint of advertisements is they perform the role of social control. With capitalistic corporations assuming cultural hegemony over the American society, their advertising implicitly engineers consensus around myths that Americans take for granted but are necessary to keep our capitalistic engine running. For example, ads perpetuate the culture of consumerism, convincing people that you can’t get enough entertainment (Paramount, Disney), that it’s time for a new car (GM), that you are always hungry for junk food, (way too many examples this year: Cheetos, Doritos, FritoLays, M&M’s) and that alcohol is the solution to every problem (Bud Light, Stella Artois). The numerous celebrity cameos also seduce us into purchase and consume more by broadening our reference groups who we compare our lives to, spurring on unsustainable consumption goals as well as generating unattainable expectations of fitness, body shape and sexual allure. Despite these manipulative intentions, Super Bowl ads are not scorned but widely embraced by Americans as a cultural phenomenon, with 18% of viewers considering them to be the most important aspect of the SB viewing experience. This exemplifies Gramsci’s viewpoint of how the masses have been socialized to ads to the point that we willingly let ourselves be sold to by America’s biggest corporations under the guise of humorous creative storytelling with our favourite celebrities on it.
Furthermore, given the prohibitive costs of running Super Bowl ads, only the biggest companies with the largest marketing budgets can afford ad slots. Hence, this creates a vicious cycle that entrenches the economic and cultural power of the largest American corporations — they are rich enough to afford Super Bowl ads to reach the most Americans, leading to them monopolizing the American customer base and earning even more profits. This dynamic is ever-present in the beer industry, where independent craft beer breweries find it increasingly difficult to compete with massive multinationals like Anheuser-Busch (the company behind Budweiser) for customers.
Last but not least, popular culture can serve to reinforce social inequalities among dimensions such as gender and race. The Super Bowl is just one example of how the spotlight of sporting fame and stardom disproportionately falls on men across nearly all sports (except perhaps tennis and soccer in the US’ case). I will start with the obvious fact that the Super Bowl and NFL is a men’s sport. The most-watched sporting event among females in the US was the 2019 Women’s Soccer World Cup, attracting 20 million viewers, barely a fifth of Super Bowl. In terms of pay, there is a huge gender pay gap as well which comes as a result of the lopsided attention: Naomi Osaka is America’s richest American sportswoman earning $35 million, while quite a few NFL quarterbacks have annual salaries in excess of $50 million. The Super Bowl, being a masculine sporting event, is also guilty of perpetuating the stereotyping, objectification and underrepresentation of women. It goes without saying that all NFL football players were men, and the most prominent role of women in the Big Game is cheerleading (though there were no cheerleaders in 2021 due to the pandemic) wearing revealing costumes. Much like Hollywood films as we explored last week in This Changes Everything, females are massively under-represented in Super Bowl ads — with just 3.4% of Super Bowl ads over the past 10 years featuring female principal characters. Additionally, women have previously been objectified in Super Bowl ads to cater to the supposed male-dominated sports audience — one example is the Carl Jr.’s ad in 2015 featuring Charlotte McKinney. Given that 47% of Super Bowl viewers are female, and the fact that women care more about the Super Bowl ads than men, this illustrates how persistent and normalized gender stereotypes have been in American society. Furthermore, given the immense viewership of Super Bowl, the ads are even more powerful in influencing the cultural perceptions of millions of youths. In recent years, given the general shift in attitudes favoring diversity and representation, the Super Bowl as an event has made progress in female representation: the ads have become more inclusive, portraying more females in leading or nuanced roles. One example this year is Amazon’s Alexa’s Body ad, which flips the gender-based narrative around and depicts an African American woman fantasizing about the male body of her Alexa’s voice. Additionally, NFL official Sarah Thomas made history this year by becoming the first woman to officiate in a Super Bowl.
In conclusion, The Super Bowl LV epitomizes American culture — its love for sports, music, socialization and capitalism, and regardless of whether you adopt the functionalist (a majority of American households watch it and half of Americans plan gatherings around it) or critical (the event generates $17 billion to the economy) lens, is a critical and unmissable event for America. And hence, though many American cities entered 2021 under pandemic-induced shutdowns, no virus can shut down the cultural blockbuster that is the Super Bowl.
