The Super Bowl does not tell a heart-wrenching tale of love, loss and Boston
Everyone loves the Super Bowl. It’s a great time to just get together, sit with your friends (but not too close because you don’t want to give your bros the wrong impression) and turn off your brain for a solid three hours.
But this Super Bowl Sunday, instead of merely watching the Super Bowl like any other average, unbothered person, I chose to partake in a much more intellectually stimulating activity for two hours and 17 minutes. That’s right, I watched “Manchester by the Sea,” an equally troubling American drama that doesn’t involve the violence and capitalistic ideals embedded in football, but instead involves a very distraught Casey Affleck living in Boston, Mass. and just kind of making the most out of that.
Unlike the rest of America, who chose to waste their Sunday by not challenging their intellect, my intellect was particularly challenged while watching this movie because I had to take painstaking effort to figure out just what exactly each character was trying to convey through their thick, unhinged Boston accents.
For the first half of the movie, everything seemed like it was going to be okay, and I really thought I wouldn’t need to put on subtitles. “That would be ridiculous,” I thought to myself as I physically restrained my hand from clicking the subtitles button.
At some points during the movie, like when Casey Affleck is just kind of being quiet while his life falls down around him, I admit I had to ask myself whether it would just be less emotionally crippling to turn on the TV and watch the Bald Birds tackle the Nationalists.
Nevertheless, she persisted. Me, that is. I persisted and tried to keep watching “Manchester by the Sea” without subtitles, which proved to be a much more difficult task than I could have ever anticipated, because apparently everybody from Boston, Mass. has their own dialect. I tried to ignore this, but eventually caved in and turned on Justin Timberlake’s Halftime performance. After three seconds, I turned it off and proceeded with my tour of Massachusetts.
In the end, I made it a whole 45 minutes into the “movie” until I really just had to give into temptation and turn on subtitles because I couldn’t decipher a single phrase that any character was attempting to say. Once the subtitles were on, it was like I was watching the beginning of a completely different movie. In a way, I sort of preferred that, because it was as if I got two movies for the price of one.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I had a much better Super Bowl Sunday than any other American. I not only transcended time and space by cleverly choosing to watch “Manchester by the Sea,” but I also ended up becoming fluent in an entirely different language.
Written by: Lara Loptman — lrloptman@ucdavis.edu
(This article is humor and/or satire, and its content is purely fictional. The story and the names of “sources” are fictionalized.)
