If you look at Super Bowl commercials as a barometer of the American mood, then America must be in a very dark place.  How else to account for the theme of violence, cruelty, and threat that seemed to be an undercurrent of so many spots?

In an ad for Snickers, an elderly Betty White is slammed into the mud during a touch football game.  In an ad allegedly promoting family values, Tim TeBow violently tackles his mother. Meanwhile, Volkswagen encouraged people to punch one another, and CBS promoted its show NCIS by trying to make a head smack the new national catch phrase. But no series of ads better reflected the dark underbelly of the American mood than Doritos.  One spot featured a four-year-old boy threatening his mom’s boyfriend.  Another featured the Dorito chip as a neck-piercing weapon. And a third offered a man faking his own death so he could lay in a coffin filled with chips (sending the perhaps unintended message about the health benefits of Doritos).  Taken as a whole, I found the Doritos spots cruel and sick—and they definitely did not encourage me to buy Doritos.

I’m not a psychiatrist.  I don’t even play one on TV.  And it’s risky to draw too broad a conclusion from a handful of television ads, but it seems to me that at some level these spots might represent a great frustration among Americans about our current economic situation.  With the lack of a clear way out of the mess we are in, lashing out in violence might prove comforting.  Fruitless, but comforting.

Even in this darkness, a few rays of positivity were on display.  Universal promoted its new version of Robin Hood (a classic “sticking-it-to-the-Man” story perfect for these times).  But my personal favorite was the ad for Google tracking a romance from a café in Paris to a newborn baby.  It was charming and effective, and perhaps represents the most important message of all: no matter how bleak the conditions, you can always search your way out.