Pick an event, any event. The upcoming Super Bowl. Or the recent State of the Union address. More and more, it seems that we are caught up not so much in the event itself — the football game or the president's speech — but in the events around the event. The sideshows. The marginalia.
We focus on the peripherals: the sprinkles, not the ice cream; the moons, not Saturn; the sauces, not the barbecue.
When it came to the State of the Union, we honed in on the Sarah Palin "pre-response," the Michele Bachmann "Tea-response," the real-time message board threads and scrolling tweets. Some of us even muted the sound of the president occasionally so we could read all of the smart and/or snarky comments — on Twitter feeds, on Gawker, on Fark — about what he was saying.
And when the Super Bowl finally rolls around this Sunday, we will talk more about the ads and the personal, off-field stories — seamy and sappy — than the actual game.
It's true at other events as well: weddings, birthdays, bar mitzvahs. The food, the clothes, the music are often just as intriguing, if not more so, than the central event.
In Shakespeare's day, the play was the thing. Today the play, it seems, is just one of the things.
Bar Mitzvah Disco
Have we always been this way, focusing on the peripheral? Perhaps not.
You've seen the black-and-white photographic evidence of a time when we knew how to pay attention in the moment. The whole family gathered around the radio to listen to President Franklin Roosevelt. Everyone is zoned into the president's voice as he delivers a Fireside Chat or the State of the Union address. No bells, no whistles. Just the pure event.
Or take the bar/bat mitzvah then and now. In 1895, the Los Angeles Times reported on a bar mitzvah. The story is a solemn, straightforward representation of a serious, history-rich ritual. Here's a representative paragraph chronicling the young man's passage: "The ceremony concluded with his formal presentation to the church by the rabbi, and, after another chant in the stately Hebrew, massive with the weight of centuries, the benediction was pronounced in English."
In contrast, here are some details from a Los Angeles Times report of a bat mitzvah a century later, in 1995. The parents threw a party for 160 guests in celebration of their daughter's coming-of-age. The party plans included a seven-piece band, a fog machine, various party games, a magician/fire-eater, an emcee and other performers. "One of the female DJs showed up wearing a black leotard and tailed tux outfit" that the boy's mother "thought skimpy and provocative," the Times reported.
Hank Stuever, a culture and TV critic at The Washington Post, sees our predisposition toward the peripheral reflected in the way we approach big-budget, superhero movies. He has a pet theory that Hollywood shouldn't even bother making blockbuster movies anymore. They should just make the trailers.
"People just want to 'see' Ryan Reynolds in the Green Lantern costume, make sure his six-pack abs costume contains six or more abs and then remark on whether or not he looks cool enough to pass muster as the Green Lantern," Stuever says.
The same goes for the new British actor who is going to be the next Superman. "The minute he gets in the Superman costume and an official picture is released, it's basically over," Stuever says. Before the movie is even out.
"A 100-minute movie is too much for this crowd," Stuever says. "Maybe one day soon we'll just watch trailers, with our instant comments running in a crawl under the screen."
To James Walkup, an associate professor of clinical psychology at Rutgers University, the creeping peripheralism in popular culture is reminiscent of the deconstructionist movement in literature classes of the 1980s.
"Why let a text dictate its center, where it puts its focus?" Walkup says. The idea that something is being "presented" to us, something out of our control, he says, doesn't sit so well with contemporary Americans.
"Accepting a well-staged event might allow some ideologically tinged presentation to hide all the untidy bits or contradictions offstage," Walkup says, "where they are barely visible."
So we pay attention to everything — except what is on center stage.
Hoopla And Hype
The Super Bowl has become a supreme example of pop-cult peripheralism. The game Sunday, which will be watched by tens of millions of people worldwide, will feature exorbitantly expensive and elaborate advertising from some of America's highest-profile companies. Advertising Age reports that Justin Bieber and Ozzy Osbourne will be shilling for Best Buy, and the domain-name storehouse Go Daddy will trot out "spokesbabes" Danica Patrick and Jillian Michaels.
The hours-long broadcast will probably be peppered with stories of players' tribulations. Will Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger be able to overcome his tumultuous personal life? Does Green Bay Packers QB Aaron Rodgers even have a personal life? Which longhaired player — Clay Matthews of the Packers or Troy Polamalu of the Steelers — will have a better outing?
The history of peripheral sidebars that accompany megasporting events can be traced back at least to Roone Arledge of ABC Sports. He created the Up Close and Personal segments about Olympic athletes in the 1960s to get us interested in arcane activities like compulsory figure skating and the biathlon. Bob Costas of NBC has perfected the athlete-overcomes-adversity stories that make you root for the guy with the sobbier tale.
A recent story in The Wall Street Journal enumerates all of the hyperbolic hoopla surrounding — make that subsuming — the 2011 Super Bowl: the extravagance of TV ads; the provocativeness of Fergie's halftime-show attire, a reported $900 parking space that includes its own restroom.
Then there are the NFL corporate controversies: a possible revenue-threatening labor dispute; increased attention to the physical dangers of the game, including concussions and life-altering injuries; and the purported plan to add two extra games to the regular-season schedule.
The game itself is a "sideshow," according to the Journal, and will probably feature about 11 minutes of actual on-field football action.
Who's playing on the field in Dallas again? Oh, yes. Two of the league's un-glitziest teams. Imagine the pyrotechnics if the game pitted the New England Patriots (whose first-string quarterback is married to a supermodel) against the Dallas Cowboys (whose injured first-string quarterback is dating Miss Missouri USA 2008).
"I wonder if there are football fans who still watch deliberately and with full attention?" Stuever asks. "Sort of like the slow-food movement of sports fans?"
The Event Experience
When corporate sponsorship consultant Kim Skildum-Reid speaks of carefully staged events such as the Super Bowl, she includes all the attention-getting ads, the up-close-and-personal stories and the NFL corporate rigmarole attendant to the spectacle.
She calls the whole shebang the "event experience."
As the event experience has evolved and expanded beyond the central occurrence, savvy marketers have discovered ways to cash in, says Skildum-Reid, owner of Power Sponsorship, a globally active marketing company in Sydney.
What really interests her now is the next level of peripheralism, "all of the stuff that is not controlled by the event — the stuff that belongs to the people, that they control and that they change and mold into an experience that is customized just for them. This includes the tailgating, the parties, gambling, social media, blogging, arguments, patriotism, fervor, traffic jams, the vibe in the city, anticipation, memories, bragging rights and more. It happens in homes, pubs, the Net, and everywhere else."
Figuring out ways to comprehend all of this chaos, let alone sell products against it, will be challenging.
Choreographed events such as the Super Bowl and the State of the Union are suffering the same faded fate as blockbuster Hollywood movies, preset musical albums, network television shows and just about everything else that we cannot control ourselves.
In this Epoch of Peripheralism, the Internet and cell phones and iPads have emboldened us, empowered us to pay attention not to what someone prescribes, but to what we darn well please.
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