Just another nonevent event
Oh so long ago, in 1999 to be exact, rap bad girl Lil’ Kim popped up on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards wearing a clinging dress that only managed to cover one of her breasts. The other was bare except for a lavender pastie. When she presented the best hip-hop video award to the Beastie Boys, her co-presenter, Diana Ross, gave her exposed breast a friendly jiggle. Lil’ Kim’s bare-nearly-all appearance was a brief blip on the media radar screen. There were no front-page headlines, no breathless Us Weekly cover stories, no abject apologies and no fulminations from the chairman of the FCC and assorted politicians.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why Janet Jackson’s breast baring during the Super Bowl halftime show sparked such a huge outpouring of outrage while Lil’ Kim’s antics went largely without comment, as did the Grammy Awards promo that ran seconds after Jackson’s exposure featuring Britney Spears in an outfit at least as lewdly revealing as Jackson’s. Controversy is all about context. Network TV has a contract with the American public: It can run sexist beer ads, including one in which a flatulent horse ignites a woman’s hair, as well as tacky erectile dysfunction commercials, but the contract says no bare breasts, even if the shot lasts a grand total of 1.5 seconds. Leave the smarmy sexual innuendo to the Victoria’s Secret lingerie special, which of course ran on CBS in prime time without provoking a four-alarm media freak-out.
A wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl seems, well, bigger than life. At least until this year’s debacle, the Super Bowl was a family event. But the MTV Awards prides itself on cutting-edge cool, or at least cutting-edge self-promotion, which is why you have a 50% chance of tuning in to the show any given year and finding two headline-needy starlets in a lip lock on stage.
But the Super Bowl and the MTV Awards do have something essential in common. They are prime examples of what historian Daniel Boorstin called a “pseudo-event,” a manufactured occurrence so ambiguous that it is neither genuine nor fake. A University of Chicago historian who later won a Pulitzer Prize for his trilogy “The Americans,” Boorstin coined the phrase in his influential 1961 book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.”
He viewed pseudo-events largely in a political context, using the term to describe spectacles like the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates as well as various press conferences and staged interviews. Even though the political media are still suckers for a clever manufactured event, such as the president’s “Mission Accomplished” flight-deck landing, the pseudo-event has found its true home in show business. Everywhere you look, you see perfect fits for what Boorstin calls the “synthetic novelty” that has flooded our experience, events that are somehow contrived or fabricated. Take the Golden Globes (please!). The celebrity-studded award show commands vast media attention and has become a leading barometer for the Oscar race.
It hardly matters that the Globes are chosen by the 90 obscure members of the flyweight Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., an organization whose credentials have been repeatedly questioned by many of the same media outlets that, by their respectful coverage, give credence to the event.
Reality TV is full of pseudo-events, especially shows like “Survivor,” which masquerade as reality when they are actually as carefully scripted as any sitcom. The Internet has joined the party, thanks to the infamous Paris Hilton sex tape, a classic pseudo-event (was it real or staged or both?) that surely has been viewed by more people than watch any of ABC’s sitcoms. Even the fabled Sundance Film Festival now reeks of pseudo-eventdom, having been transformed from a showcase for art films to a corporate bazaar teeming with celebrities (even Paris Hilton made the scene this year) who are there to be seen, not to see films. This year’s festival actually had more corporate sponsors, including Cesar, the festival’s official dog food, than entries in the festival’s signature dramatic competition.
Today’s pseudo-events are so omnipresent that we hardly notice their artifice or how much they shape the way we view the world. They have become defining moments, coloring the way we make our judgments, whether it’s an Oscar nomination validating a movie or a 20-second clip of Howard Dean bellowing at a campaign rally, sinking his presidential prospects.
The recent Iowa caucuses are a classic manufactured event, founded largely as a way to steal the spotlight away from New Hampshire, which traditionally held the first presidential primary. The importance of the caucuses lies not so much in their actual numbers -- this year’s winner, Sen. John Kerry, got 45,000 votes -- as their symbolic value, since the winner is crowned by the media as the new man to beat.
The same logic applies to the Academy Awards. While an Oscar looks good on a mantelpiece, its real value is as a marketing tool to persuade balky moviegoers to pass up that Adam Sandler comedy and see a highbrow drama instead. For all its pomp and solemnity, the Oscars are simply a classier version of “Survivor.” After watching a stack of movies and being bombarded by millions of dollars in “for your consideration” advertising, the assembled academy members vote the less worthy films off the island.
Since its inception, the Super Bowl has been the ultimate pseudo-event, a spectacle created initially to sell the merger of two football leagues and then, when it proved successful beyond everyone’s wildest dreams, as a gigantic launching pad for any advertiser who wanted to put its brand on the map. The ads often overshadow the actual game, a perfect illustration of Boorstin’s theory that Americans are especially receptive to pseudo-events because they find ordinary life so dreary that they want their experience artificially sweetened.
A true cynic would argue that Jackson’s breast-baring is the logical outcome of this need for artificial enhancement. After all, Jackson’s performance was an advertisement for herself. She was on stage not because she has any currency in today’s culture like Kid Rock and P. Diddy -- her best years are way behind her. She was there to promote her new album.
That’s the core problem with today’s pop culture: Everything revolves around marketing, from Oscars to presidential campaigns. Advertising and media manipulation have become more of an art form than the art itself. The two-minute trailer for a Mike Myers movie is generally far more entertaining than the film itself, just as MTV’s promos for its Video Awards are usually far more clever than anything in the actual program. The problem marketers face is simple: They constantly have to create more sizzle, which inevitably leads to fiascos like the Super Bowl halftime show.
Sizzle boosts ratings and box-office receipts, but in an era dominated by the synergization of media conglomerates, it often causes a collision of corporate brands that can cause unintended consequences. At the Super Bowl, the brand collision was between two Viacom entities, CBS and MTV. And it was Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone’s aggressive advocacy of synergy that no doubt played a key role in the disastrous decision to have MTV (dubbed by the Wall Street Journal last week as “Viacom’s Porn Channel”) produce the halftime show.
This same lust for cross-corporate-pollinization has repeatedly soiled the CBS brand, whether by airing an hourlong commercial for Michael Jackson’s new album (sorry, an entertainment special) linked to an exclusive interview with its news division or by landing an interview with rescued POW Jessica Lynch linked to a grab-bag of goodies, including an MTV-hosted concert special in her hometown. Hey, how’s that for a pseudo-event?
All these corporate-inspired shenanigans have left everyone’s credibility in tatters. When NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue blasted MTV’s halftime production as “offensive and inappropriate,” you had to wonder: Had he never watched any MTV Video Awards? When CBS’ Les Moonves said he was “shocked and dismayed” over the halftime show, were we supposed to find that more believable than his contention that CBS’ cancellation of its “The Reagans” miniseries had nothing to do with right-wing pressure and boycott threats?
And when FCC Commissioner Michael Powell condemned the Jackson stunt as “crass and deplorable,” were we supposed to forget that Powell’s advocacy of relaxed media ownership rules would allow conglomerates like Viacom to have even more sway in the marketplace and less accountability? I’m glad everyone is so outraged. And I’m delighted to see our suddenly public-spirited media companies respond with such meaningful gestures as imposing a five-minute delay on Sunday’s Grammy Awards and forcing “ER” to cut a shot of an elderly woman’s breast.
But the uproar really wasn’t over a brief glimpse of Janet’s breast, it was over her injecting a tiny sliver of shameless spontaneity into a totally manufactured event. I’m sure we’ll all get over it. What I’m really waiting to see is who gets Jackson to sit for an exclusive interview, complete with a “premiere” of the video from her new album. That would be a pseudo-event of truly epic proportions.
“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to Patrick.Goldstein@latimes.
com.