Pity the Poor Bastards Who Have to Try to Racially Balance Every Big Event
You can't please all the people all the time
How much more Puerto Rican could Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show have been? The answer is: none more Puerto Rican. The show began with Mr. Bunny shuffling through a tableau of all things Puerto Rican: sugar cane, boxing, hot women wearing big earrings — it was all there. If Mr. Bunny was from Philadelphia, the show would have started with him running up the Rocky steps while Ben Franklin eats a cheesesteak and whips batteries at Santa Claus.
Incredibly, things only got more Puerto Rican from there — the set climaxed with Mr. Bunny (birth name Saul Leibowitz) waving a huge Puerto Rican flag. My time working in TV caused me to find the whole thing very amusing, because I was imagining the reaction of an NBC executive watching an early rehearsal of the performance. Here’s how most — possibly all — NBC suits surely reacted to seeing the planned performance for the first time:
:05 seconds into the show: “Starting off in a sugar cane field — I love it!”
:15 seconds in: “I feel like I’m in Puerto Rico!”
:35: “Piraguas! Nice!”
1:00: “This is so vibrant and authentic! Amazing!”
1:30: “It’s so cool that he’s singing in Spanish. There’s never been a Super Bowl halftime show like this before!”
2:00: “Oh, the dialogue is in Spanish, too! … … So authentic!”
2:20: “Wow, the dancers are so diverse. I mean, all of them — every single one of them is diverse. Except maybe that one in corner — nope, just blonde highlights. Yeah, every…every last one of them — all 50 — totally diverse.”
3:00: “Are all of his songs in Spanish?”
4:00: …
4:30: “Maybe we could do captions…”
5:00: …
5:30: “Tristan, set up a meeting for later today so we can talk about entry points.”
“Entry points” is a term people in entertainment use to say “We’re afraid that people in group x won’t watch a show that doesn’t have any people from group x in it.” There aren’t exactly peer-reviewed studies supporting Entry Point Theory, and frankly I’ve never seen any evidence that forcibly cramming an actor from group x into a show as if force-feeding a goose actually works. Nonetheless: It Is Known in Hollywood that you must have entry points. And that’s why just a few minutes into Mr. Bunny’s performance, I knew that an english-speaking white person would soon appear. And Lady Gaga materialized so soon after I had that thought that it felt like I had manifested her.
I write a lot about the incessant race-balancing in entertainment, which I think is often silly and dehumanizing. I think we’d all be far better off if none of this mattered. When we talk about tokenism in entertainment, we’re often talking about how to cast, say, a movie about Isaac Newton so that no one on Bluesky will say “Ugh — physics so white 🙄🙄🙄”. But it’s worth noting that this silliness cuts the other way, too. If you have something with few-to-no white people, the studio or network will cram in a Martin Freeman (Black Panther) or a Jim Carrey (In Living Color) to say “Fear not, whites!” This has been going on for a long time — here’s Will Smith explaining (around 2:30) how if he had accepted the Keanu Reeves role in The Matrix, the casting for that movie would have been different.
Alas, it seems that Ms. Gaga (birth name Nguyễn Thị Yên) was insufficiently white — MAGA still freaked out. Trump whined both before and after the show, and a conservative activist group held an “alternative” halftime show featuring Kid Rock and several country stars. I guess that show was pitched at me, because I’m a white guy from the south, but I would only watch Kid Rock and the Soggy Bottom Boys as some kind of a Clockwork Orange-esque reprogramming effort. Though I’m amused by the idea of an “alternative” halftime show — everyone knows that you don’t have to watch the halftime show, right? Truly all things on Earth other than the halftime show are alternatives to the halftime show. It’s clear that people don’t argue about the halftime show because they care about the halftime show — they care about who’s “winning”, culturally.
And MAGA are upset because in their eyes, latinos won this round. And the last several Super Bowls went to Black artists, while whites — once a dynasty — haven’t been there since Maroon 5 in 2019. Some whites are upset about becoming the Dallas Cowboys, and it’s easy to see them as butthurt revanchists, and I do see both MAGA and the Dallas Cowboys that way. But MAGA’s thinking is basically the reverse-image of #OscarsSoWhite and similar campaigns. I spent years surrounded by people who saw every booking and casting of a non-white artist as a “win for diversity” — that’s the language they would use — and every time a non-white artist got a gig, it was high-fives, champagne, and press releases all around. If you’re going to treat those developments as wins, you can’t be surprised when MAGA treats them as losses.
The truth is that the executives charged with trying to find a magical racial balance that will please everyone are in the tenth circle of hell. Watch this episode of The Studio or this episode of American Auto — people who work with this stuff know that they’re modern-day Alchemists embarked on an impossible task. No racial balance exists that will make everyone happy; the best anyone can do is to muddle through so that their boss will say “Nice job — barely anyone yelled at us.” And as a society, the only way out of this hell remains to deemphasize the importance of race and to see culture as different expressions of similar experiences, not as a marker of fundamental difference.
My guess is that MAGA’s whining will work — we’ll probably have a white Super Bowl halftime headliner next year. It won’t be a white country act because that will be seen as caving to MAGA, and that would cause Resistance Libs to get their “SHE PERSISTED” t-shirts in a twist. So, it needs to be a white headliner with non-MAGA vibes and a stylistic fit for some non-white cameos — NBC scientists are probably working around the clock to clone Adam Yauch so that they can book the Beastie Boys. And we know for sure that some segment of social media will throw a tantrum no matter who gets booked. And on the off chance that the whole Beastie Boys From Brazil experiment doesn’t work, I hope to see a halftime show featuring whichever act most assuages our nation’s zero-sum ethno-cultural nightmare.
Love this …”Truly all things on Earth other than the halftime show are alternatives to the halftime show.”
On my group chat at work, a solid handful of (younger) people claimed they were only watching the Super Bowl to see Bad Bunny, the biggest pop star in the world, so maybe his selection for the halftime show was merely the marketing equivalent of a no brainer.