The Download

What a Show!

Though the halftime spectacle certainly seemed like a classic male-on-female ravaging—Justin ripping Janet’s clothes off, presumably as a prelude to having his way with her—the opposite was true. Justin, clearly, was just a victim. So was National Football League commissioner Paul Tagliabue, who testified before Congress last Wednesday that as he “started looking at the halftime show, I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach.” (More violence against men!) Mel Karmazin, president and COO of Viacom (the parent company of CBS, which broadcast the Super Bowl) and MTV (which produced the halftime show), was another victim. He spoke solemnly before the congressional committee about CBS’s internal investigation: The network conducted interviews with some 50 “witnesses” of the events leading up to halftime, as if it were a capital-crime case. The citizens of Harris County, Texas, in whose stadium the crime took place, are victims, too—their local legislators are looking into imposing a “morality clause,” from now on, in the contracts of performers who ride into their town. And the 200,000 Americans who lodged complaints with the FCC were surely victims, as was the Tennessee woman who briefly filed a class-action lawsuit, demanding unspecified billions in damages from the perpetrators of this act.

If Janet Jackson’s breast could do billions of dollars of damage, surely the Sex and the City six-season boxed set, when it comes out, could bring down the world’s economy.

Forget wardrobe malfunction. The key element of the insta-strip-show’s failure was that it was handled with utter, udder seriousness. Janet Jackson in full “Rhythm Nation” regalia, singing a medley of her old hits, and doing those spastic, Paula Abdul–esque dance moves with her nasty-girl and nasty-boy dancers—it had a depressingly retro feel. We were watching an artist whose once vital career has been preserved in amber. It was 1989 again. Then there was the specter of her brother Michael, who is experiencing his own Groundhog Day moment (his 2004 is 1993), hanging over the stage.

And then, because Janet’s strip show became the most TiVo’ed moment in history, her pendulous breast—it pains me to note that it is no longer pert—was typically viewed in ominous, ultra-slow-mo, perp-walk style. (In real time, the flash of her breast hardly registered; it was little more than a “Did I just see that?” moment.) And thus it became perhaps the most parsed few seconds of footage since the Zapruder film. (Justin Timberlake, we’ve all concluded, could not possibly have acted alone.)

The triumph of Sex—what allowed it to triumph—is that it cut its brazen sexuality with humor. In fact, as assiduous as it’s been about sensitively cataloguing the travails of modern gals juggling the demands of life and love and work and shoes, it’s often treated sex as little more than fodder for screwball comedy.

Whereas Janet Jackson’s breast—unleashed on a world that wasn’t expecting it—just underscored the sadness of sex.

Okay, you know what?

There’s an upside here. Our collective temporary insanity—dear G-d, please let it be temporary—about Janet has distracted us from the final episodes of Sex and the City. Which, truth be told, have ended up seeming gratuitously sad—and not just because the show’s drag-queens-at-the-clown-rodeo wardrobe schtick (particularly in regard to Sarah Jessica Parker) has definitively passed from glam to gruesome.

This season, of course, the sex-crazed Samantha character, played by Kim Cattrall, was diagnosed with breast cancer. In a multipart story arc that’s taken her from discovery (she’d gone in to get a boob job) to lumpectomy to chemo, Sex has been uncharacteristically (and awkwardly) saddled with sustained gravitas. The show’s sense of comedy this season has strayed in the direction of be-strong-Samantha gallows humor. Hilarity doesn’t ensue, for instance, when she’s on her knees giving her handsome actor boyfriend head, and while he’s grasping her hair in ecstacy, a clump of it falls out into his hand. (He loses his erection, and then later shaves his blond mane, somewhat predictably, in solidarity with Samantha.)

Janet Jackson’s career has been drooping for years. Sex and the City was hot almost till the end. Then the show had to go all Lifetime on us. (If it had gone a seventh season, what remaining women’s topics could it have possibly tackled? Female genital circumcision? Hermaphroditism?)

Janet Jackson may never have known that sex is funny. Sex and the City always knew—but then, at the very last minute, forgot. Perhaps the final taboo, the one no one needed Sex to try to break, is earnestness.