Super Bowl!!!: Punt return of the repressed

Coach John Harbaugh kisses his running back Ray Rice after defeating the Denver Broncos to advance to the AFC championship.

        
        The Super Bowl is 7 days away! 30-second commercials will cost between 3.7 and 3.8 million dollars. The cost of these ad buys gives us an idea of the importance of the Super Bowl in the American cultural landscape. In this era of fracturing audiences and internet-driven compartmentalization, there is still one show that Americans watch together, simultaneously. Many of these people are not regular football watchers. Quite a few will be watching the disjointed action and the seemingly arbitrary enforcement of the arcane rules and wonder: What is the big fuckin' deal?
            The Super Bowl falls on Feb. 3, close to the pagan holiday of Imbolc. However, it is important to understand the Super Bowl as a Solstice event. The college bowl games, which the Super Bowl is a more highly capitalized version of, traditionally occur between Christmas and New Year's. The Rose Bowl, the original bowl game, is pegged to New Year's day. The Super Bowl has been pushed back from the Solstice because of the extended (In 1970, only eight teams were included in the playoffs. By 1990, 12 teams were involved.) playoff period. The league extended the playoff period to generate more ad revenue.
             The Super Bowl is essentially a battle between two teams to see who will represent darkness and the old year (the losers) and who will embody the new year and the Sun child ("I'm going to Disneyworld!").  There are also important connections to the ancient Roman solstice festival of Saturnalia. The inversion of social norms was an important part of Saturnalia, and these inversions are an important part of the Super Bowl as well. This is best embodied by the players dumping Gatorade on the coach after the victory is sealed. The servant/master relationship is upended as surely as the orange vessel itself. These violations of social norms are the primary attraction of the Super Bowl. This is what is so compelling to so many viewers.
             Football is a celebration of the male body, which is normally subject to tight control by society. The destructive potential and rampant sexuality of the male body are kept in check by obligations and laws. This energy is channeled into physical labor beneficial to the community. In the game of football, the obligations and laws of society are represented by the submission of the players to the coaches and officials. This theme of the male body under control is reiterated by the frequent advertisements for domestic pickups. It is no accident that many pickup owners decorate their trailer hitches with plastic testicles.

Ray Lewis cries

             However, it not the male body under control that interests us. We are watching the Super Bowl to vicariously invert social norms in Saturnalian fashion. The actual game itself is less important than the symbolic activities of the victors. The master/servant relationship is inverted by the Gatorade bath, but many other taboos are flouted as well. The behavior of Ray Lewis after winning the AFC championship game is good example of these symbolic activities. Not only did Lewis weep openly, he passionately embraced another man (the owner of the team, his boss) in a notably unchaste manner.

Ray Lewis gets a little closer to Steve Bisciotti.

This was not a brief contact, but an extended and tender connection. Joe Flacco was visibly uncomfortable. Even in 2013, it is exceedingly rare to see a man weep or demonstrate homoerotic affection on television. This is what we are really watching for: these moments when a man is liberated from the burdens of society's rules and can at least be his true self.