Has the Opening Ceremony Finished Yet?

The Director of Friday night's blasphemy said ‘I wanted everyone to feel represented’. How about the 50% of the French who are Christian? Were they 'represented'?

From The Spectator

By Gareth Roberts

The 2012 British opening ceremony has sadly become a shorthand for nostalgic Remainy twee. But la grande débâcle in Paris last night brought back with a jolt how magnificent it was. 

The creators of Paris’s opening ceremony were faced with a challenge: how to convey, in capsule form, the history and culture of France, a comparatively small nation that has provided such riches over the centuries – transcendent beauty, epoch-defining philosophy, a motor of artistic innovation and sophistication. They decided to go for something else entirely.

A peculiar introduction to the BBC coverage from actor Tom Hiddleston was an early warning sign that something was askew. Hiddleston breathlessly told us, in that very specific sick-in-the-mouth reflux register of 21st century sentimentality, that the Olympics were: ‘Watching someone’s dreams come true. Seeing them light up the world and feeling proud of them, together. So prepare for moments that will light up your eyes, and fill up your heart.’ Who writes this sub-Edwardian yoghurt-pot-blurb drivel? How do they live with themselves?

We learnt that, unlike previous ceremonies, the host city itself would be the stage. We soon realised why every previous opening ceremony had been conducted inside the arena. Because it rained – mon Dieu, did it pleuvait.

The sheer variety, pace and brevity of each section of the 2012 event contrasted with what began, very slowly, to unfold. This was bloated, each separate thin section swiftly outstaying its welcome. It went on, and on, and on. You were a different person with different hopes, beliefs, when it started. You could wander off, get married, get divorced, spend eleven years in prison, and emerge to find it still going on.

The scattergun array of the offering was bewildering. For some reason we were served forgotten noughties American pop star Lady Gaga – shocking if you’re 14 in 2008, but that makes you 30 now. There was a headless Marie Antoinette, a piano inexplicably set alight, and – inevitably – a bevy of slaying and sashaying drag queens and ‘non-binaries’, performing a sassy vogue parody of The Last Supper. This is the kind of phoney rebellion that was already embarrassing on stage at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in 1994, but at least was confined safely to bad gay pubs.

This maybe makes it sound quite exciting. But it’s important to get across the sheer slowness and dullness of it all. And there was so much dancing, another aspect of corporate-sanctioned 21st century culture. There must be endless choreography. Everyone must dance, at all times, everywhere.

The most tedious part of the ceremony is the arrival of the athletes – the ‘ooh look is that Tom Daley’ section. So naturally that part became grotesquely extended, with the competitors processing endlessly down the Seine in small boats. Endless boats, endless floats. A feeling of despair. How can there be this many countries?
This was followed by the singing of our secular hymn, John Lennon’s horrible ‘Imagine’. ‘Imagine there’s no countries’ is a bold lyric when you’ve just bored the world to death by enumerating every single one with excruciating tediousness.

It was all very decadent, yes, but not in the way it thinks it was
Spectacle is best kept short and sharp. I’m sure the mechanical silver horse riding up the Seine was a marvel but by that time my spectacle-appreciating neurons were wiped out. I think I heard a pleasantly sung version of ‘La Marseillaise’ at one point too, drowned in a tide of goo. The thing climaxed with Celine Dion and an impressive hot air balloon, but by that point they could’ve wheeled on genuine extraterrestrials or de Gaulle back from the dead and I’d have been begging it to just stop.

It was all very decadent, yes, but not in the way it thinks it was. Because this wasn’t French at all, but a display of American cultural imperialism, the goading and the power display of wokeness, establishing the new sacred – transgenderism, multiculturalism – and repudiating and mocking the old. Daring you to object. Director Thomas Jolly apparently said beforehand of his opus, ‘I wanted everyone to feel represented’. This is a telling remark. Because ‘everyone’ doesn’t actually mean everyone, it means only the narcissistic elements of newly sacralised minorities. Nobody else exists.

Like all of this culture, it was contemptuous, shambolic (the Olympic flag was flown upside down) and pompous. ‘This is France!’ Macron tweeted during it, handing Marine le Pen material for years.