What percentage of the Super Bowl audience did not understand — and had no hope of understanding — the bandaged faces of the male dancers in the halftime show?

I didn't even get that we were supposed to see the face coverings as bandages. We were just guessing. We thought of jock straps and covid masks and mummies. We never even hit on the correct answer — which I'm reading about this morning — which is the kind of bandages wrapped over a face that's been subjected to plastic surgery. And if you'd told me that was what I was supposed to see, I wouldn't have had any idea why that was the chosen costume for the ordinarily festive event. It's been a drearily medicalized year with the covid lockdown, so why would you attempt to entertain us using some other medical thing — plastic surgery? Why would you do that this year — or any year? 

Here's a news report from news.com.au:

The Weeknd has performed his highly anticipated Super Bowl halftime show for 2021, and unexpectedly, his face was completely normal, with no real plastic surgery in sight. The 30-year-old has been teasing fans with wild face prosthetics and bandages for weeks leading up to the performance and new album release.

Ugh! I guess if I'd been a fan of this guy, I might have noticed his PR antics, and then it would have been amusing that he hadn't had plastic surgery on his face, and it might also have been funny that the dancers were wearing the kind of bandages that he had previously worn to tease us. But for those of us who hadn't seen his pre-game teasing, it was just weird and confusing. I guess The Weeknd didn't care about reaching out to any new fans. It was just an inside joke. An inside joke about plastic surgery. 

And that was a slap in the face to the people in general, who have put up with or struggled against face coverings for many months and who might think that we couldn't be using medical facilities for elective surgery. Why would The Weeknd think joking about cosmetic surgery was a good topic for a Super Bowl show? The show normally emphasizes fun, happiness, and exuberance. The edge is ordinarily about sex. But The Weeknd came up with plastic surgery.

Here's The Weeknd's explanation of the performance:

“The significance of the entire head bandages is reflecting on the absurd culture of Hollywood celebrity and people manipulating themselves for superficial reasons to please and be validated.... It’s all a progression and we watch ‘The Character’s’ storyline hit heightened levels of danger and absurdity as his tale goes on... [You can] take that being attractive isn’t important to me but a compelling narrative is,” and explained why he’s been going back and forth between himself and “The Character”. “Why not play with the character and the artist and let those lines blur and move around?”

He gave that explanation before the big show, but how many of us in the audience had read that? And why did it need an explanation? Quite aside from whether it would have been entertaining to anyone who had the explanation, why would you do a show for such a huge general audience that was weirdly puzzling without an explanation — especially when the puzzlement was about covering the faces of the hundreds of dancers? He's claiming to critique the Hollywood culture of obsession with facial beauty, but then he's giving us only one face to look at — his. 

We were supposed to see "The Character" going through some sort of sort of "storyline" with "heightened levels of danger and absurdity." It was artsy modern dance with a theme of the alienation of the individual an a world drained of humanity. The Weeknd is the last man and everyone else is faceless, inhuman. It's like something from "Sprockets"....