Bacon and the patriarchy

Here’s a fascinating little piece of cultural arcana from exactly 50 years ago.

The embedded video is the complete ABC TV national broadcast — including commercial breaks — of the pregame and first half of the 1969 Michigan-Ohio State football game.

First, a side point: from kickoff until halftime, the game had a total of seven minutes of commercial breaks, which took place in seven one-minute segments. These segments were broadcast after scoring plays and between the first and second quarter.

What’s notable about this is that it represents about a third as much advertising as takes place during contemporary college football telecasts, and it was structured so that somebody attending the game wouldn’t even be able to tell it was on TV — very few games were in that primitive age –since a minute break between a score and a kickoff, or between quarters, feels quite natural to spectators in the stadium.

Today of course one of the most annoying aspects of attending a game in person is that one has to sit through seemingly endless breaks for advertising.

But on to our main attraction. Our hermeneutic adventure starts at the 54:44 mark, which is when we get a commercial for Wilson Certified Bacon.

This text is a veritable CultStud gold mine. Features include:

(1) A completely stationary single camera, focused on the pitchman Paul Christman — an NFL star from 20 years earlier, and now (meaning then) a broadcaster. Christman doesn’t do anything except hold up a package in a faux kitchen, and deliver his spiel, although he does sit down at a puritanically furnished table mid-pitch. There’s no action, no music, no energy of any kind. (Again, this is a national broadcast, and these advertisements were all no doubt produced by the Mad Men of that time).

(2) Most strikingly, there’s no actual appearance of the ambrosial meat that, according to Christman’s domestic gospel, will save the family breakfast. I don’t get this at all: I mean the beauty of bacon, from an advertorial point of view, is that it looks so good sizzling in its own fat. Christman even tells us it’s the kind of bacon “that looks good in the pan.” But where’s the star of the show? Clearly Don Draper didn’t have anything to do with this.

(3) What does “certified” mean? We are given no explanation of this key sign’s significance.

(4) But the real interpretive crux that led to this post is provided by the last 15 seconds of the ad. I’m not going to quote it because you need to watch it. Is he being totally serious? Or is he kidding on the square as the fascist kids say these days? Do I detect a satirical twinkle in Christman’s eye, or is that an anachronistic over-interpretation?

Actually my suspicion is that this isn’t meant as any sort of sardonic joke of the Henny Youngman genre:

I asked my wife, “Where do you want to go for our anniversary?”
She said, “Somewhere I have never been!”
I told her, “How about the kitchen?”

Boom, roasted!

But rather, what we have here is simply the patriarchy in full, unapologetic bloom, despite the crazy bra-burners that stopped shaving their legs and started getting mad when a gentleman opened the door for them right around that time, which is why we have all this political correctness now when you can’t talk like man to other men in a manly way any more.

Also too, note the apparent assumption that pretty much the entire audience for this telecast consists of married men who could no more imagine buying bacon themselves at a supermarket than they could imagine Paul Christman might not even like girls, or that a woman could one day be president.

So progress does happen, as difficult as that sometimes is to remember in the midst of the age of Trump.