Setting: At about 6PM on Sun. Feb. 3 FOX Noise network
offered a noir story about football, in some ways rivaling
HBO's _The Wire_. It began with a view of a stadium in the
middle of Arizona, a location that was an empty field just 5
years ago. This stadium was named after a campus that did not
exist except in various high rise corporate complexes around
the country: the University of Phoenix, which does not field
a football team. This stadium was built with taxpayers'
money, money that could have been used for local businesses
that do exist in Glendale, AZ, where the stadium is located.
Tickets to this game were about $700, and out of reach for
all but the most affluent10% of citizens not only of
Glendale, but of the whole country. The allusions to noir
urban novels are many faceted.
Plot: The New England team has been stealing their opponents'
signals for years, and the records were ordered destroyed.
Fate, however, could not be cheated. With their opponents
three points ahead and time left for their great QB to get in
position for a tying field goal, he had an unaccountable
brain fart and threw long hail Mary balloons. The religious
undertones were fitting, and in fact scintillating, regarding
Divine Retribution.
Sex and violence: cheerleaders, pats on the butt, dancing
hotties, a man clad in nothing but a striped hat and fake
penis (a MacGuffin perhaps), vicious strikes with hard
plastic weapons, gang violence. Despite the half-time pulp
entertainment, effort to prevent any showing of female
nipples were successful. The implications to sensitive
readers are multi-leveled.
The author: unknown, uncredited, completely underground. Thus
a unique observer of the underside of the American dream.
Some critics think there had to be not one but a whole set of
anonymous authors of this Chinese box of
dramas-within-dramas.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 21 Feb 2008 EST