GREG GUMBEL

Hello, and welcome back to Super Bowl XXXV. I’m Greg Gumbel. In just a few minutes, the E*Trade Halftime show will begin. We’re in for a treat here today, as the halftime program devised by Laurie Anderson and Robert Wilson, is titled, ‘The Life of Francis Bacon, An Expressionist Canvas of Sight and Sound’. Here to supply color commentary is the New Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl. Peter, what must Laurie Anderson be feeling right now?

PETER SCHJELDAHL

Well, obviously, she must be quite nervous, since the bar for Super Bowl halftime shows is so incredibly high. The past few years have seen one triumph after another — Ingmar Bergman’s Images of Isolation, Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem for Morality, Tom Waits’ 14-minute retelling of Gotterdammerung — it’s a lot to live up to. And, of course, we all remember what happened back in 1996, when the Super Bowl’s organizers, disastrously, decided to let Harmony Korine do his adaptation of the works of Hubert Selby, Jr., and it just turned out to be hideously banal. I mean, audiences were fine with the sex and the drugs and the nudity—I don’t think that that’s a problem with this crowd. It was just a sense that Korine had nothing particularly new to say. Nobody wants to see that happen again.

GREG GUMBEL

Peter, I’m going to interrupt you here, because the work appears to be beginning — or maybe that’s the orchestra tuning up.

PETER SCHJELDAHL

No, Greg, that’s the work itself. Laurie Anderson has decided to convey Bacon’s sense of dislocation by abandoning the traditional 12-tone scale and writing her piece for a 15-tone scale. It’s a brash and brave move, although not, perhaps an entirely successful one. Still, the crowd here today seems to be transfixed by it. They’re not sure whether they like it or not, but they’re definitely intrigued, and they’re willing to give it a chance.

GREG GUMBEL

Ah. Now, Peter, there seem to be three identically attired individuals down there. Can you tell us who they are?

PETER SCHJELDAHL

I believe all three are meant to represent Bacon — id, ego, and superego. Bacon was always fond of triptychs, so this is a somewhat predictable decision. Of course, few of us expected to see them played by Alan Cumming, Dame Judi Dench, and Takeshi Kitano — that’s an unusual move.

GREG GUMBEL

Yes. (pause). Whoa! You know, Peter, while one would scarcely expect a treatment of Bacon’s life to skirt his sadistic relationships with other men—among them his own uncle— I don’t think any of us expected to see them rendered in such graphic detail.

PETER SCHJELDAHL

Particularly by Judi Dench.

GREG GUMBEL

Yes. Now, Peter, what do you make of this sequence?

PETER SCHJELDAHL

Well, it’s hard to say exactly, since the large quantities of fake blood being sloshed around down there have momentarily disabled our cameras. But from what I can make out from here, this would appear to mark a shift from Bacon’s external reality, and into the world created by his art, in which human existence was little more than an abbatoir of the soul.

GREG GUMBEL

And who are these figures marching through the blood?

PETER SCHJELDAHL

Well, it’s hard to say, but — yes! These are images from some of Bacon’s best-known works! There are the figures from Three Studies for the Base of a Crucifixion! And here come some popes, awash in blood!

GREG GUMBEL

That’s an unusual design on the popes’ robes.

PETER SCHJELDAHL

That’s the E-Trade logo. I guess they had to integrate it somehow into the show, and I’d imagine the sponsors will be pleased as punch to see their emblem adorning one of Bacon’s best-known images.

GREG GUMBEL

I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear that last part. There’s some sort of hideous racket going on.

PETER SCHJELDAHL

That’s because all the performers are screaming at the top of their lungs, as Bacon’s subjects were wont to do.

GREG GUMBEL

It’s unbearable, Peter.

PETER SCHJELDAHL

And thoroughly ingenious! It’s really remarkable: Here, at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla., Laurie Anderson and Robert Wilson have really managed to create the sense of discomfort and unease, the queasy acknowledgement of our own mortality, that rests right at the heart of Bacon’s work. In this work, there is none of the exhilaration of the joy of creation — just a cold, damp sense of dread.

GREG GUMBEL

All three of the performers playing Bacon are now being drawn and quartered.

PETER SCHJELDAHL

Yes, I’m assuming this is a representation of Bacon’s death, and it’s a shockingly good special effect. At least, I hope it’s a special effect. In any case, that would appear to bring a conclusion to this year’s halftime show, and I think it’s safe to say that it’s an unalloyed triumph for Anderson and Wilson. Next year’s halftime crew of Todd Solondz and Abbas Kiorastami will have quite an act to follow. Here comes Robert Wilson, and the audience is greeting him with a standing ovation.

GREG GUMBEL

Well, Peter, you know what they say: If there’s one thing that you can safely say about the Super Bowl crowd, it’s that they love Expressionist painters almost as much as they love experimental avant-garde theater.