Like many, I was stunned last week by the opening ceremony at the Olympics in Paris, created by theater artist Thomas Jolly. Traditionally, these ceremonies are cultural statements of identity, having in common only that no expense is justified and no expense is spared. Also, they've gone interminable, with Paris no exception despite the driving rain.
The basic content—and I'm interpreting this as a statement of French cultural security despite all their many current divisions and problems—was all the clichés of France, a non-stop hyperbolic display of baguettes, berets, wine bottles, hunchbacks, Métro signs, dangerous liaisons, drag queens, and guillotines. Perhaps, if I am recalling correctly, Mondrian worked in Paris too before being chased away by post-impressionists, but meanwhile the opening ceremony constituted the second coming of the Rococo, this time with cyborgs, which is definitely an improvement.
I don't know much about how this spectacle was generated, or why, but it was surprising and fun and chancy. Depicting the headless-yet-screaming Marie Antionette, for example: what does it mean? Liberté? Égalité? Fraternité? None of the above, perhaps, but it made for a striking visual. It was a series of WTF? moments, which is a lot better than boring.
The final scene of the Olympic flame rising above the Tuileries, borne aloft by a full-moon balloon, was shockingly beautiful, and in contrast to the hyper-baroque lead-up. I'm not an opening-ceremony critic, and I try to forget about such things quickly so as not to clutter my mind with random detritus. But that was pretty great.
What's got the internet still screaming days later, however, was a fashion-runway interlude featuring famous drag queens. As bearded models prepared to strut their frocks, the Queens took on the form of Leonardo's Last Supper. Rather than the messiah in the center handing out the mystical bread ("this is my body you eat"), the central figure here was a Queen of Heaven dishing out musical sacraments from a DJ deck.
It was striking if also (well, to me) puzzling. Trying to decode particular messages from the presentation was a fool's errand: it was jam-packed with clashing symbols: hyper-baroque. But it did seem to have a goal of angering the Catholic Church. It's hard to anger the Catholic Church these days, which is warming to drag queens bit by bit. But it's easy to offend Americans, and maybe that's what this was about. Finally, an apt vengeance for Freedom Fries, or "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" (which admittedly was very offensive). The Last Supper of the Queen of Heaven spanked Americans hard, though honestly it's hard to tell why we got so offended. Maybe we're all Catholics after all? Well, the Supreme Court is, anyway.
I was a bit surprised that everyone on my X feed, beginning with the owner of the company, concluded from watching the opening ceremony on television that civilization as we know it is doomed. Accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers declared it "satanic." "Extremely disrespectful to Christians," said Elon, but that was the least of it. The end of the world as we know it, was the tone. The Fall of Rome, etc.
That itself is one of many indications that we’re in a period of renewed idolatry and renewed iconoclasm, our politics taking the form of wrestling over images. Kamala-Harris as Captain America and Donald Trump as Superman are in every feed.
The debate over the opening ceremony has a bit of the flavor of the Thirty Years War, with allegedly idolatrous Catholics squaring off against iconoclastic Protestants. "Those are really magnificent paintings of the holy figures you have there," we might imagine the latter remarking, "but putting them up in your church and kneeling before them is... well, you know, just a wee bit pagan." So now that we've taken your town, we'll be burning your paintings. Also, all those rich appointments and stunning outfits and jewel-encrusted goblets? We'll be melting them down.
And eventually, we might behead your Queen, who in the official images produced of her has become the symbol of all this materialism, all this worldliness, all this corruption. Really amazing outfits, though! The Protestants, and later the Revolutionaries may have considered replacing dangerous-liaison-type outfits with dour, ill-fitting clothes in muted browns and grays and blacks. That would make for a better France, no doubt, but it would make for extremely dull visuals. So Thomas Jolly & co. took a different approach.
As many have remarked, the ceremony was "iconoclastic": both highlighting and ridiculing many aspects of French identity. But it wasn't iconoclastic in the "burn the church" style. It didn’t repudiate the cult of the image; it was the reverse. It played and played and played, back and forth, reverence to ridicule, blessedness to blasphemy. I could see interpreting it as anti-Christian, and I could see interpreting it as an ecstatic expression of Christianity. It depends on what you think Christianity teaches at its heart.
I'm not sure whether this was true of Leonardo, but it was true of Caravaggio, painting the Supper at Emmaus: he depicted the followers of Jesus as peasants and prostitutes of circa-1600 Rome. If he was critiquing the Catholic Church, he was doing it from an intensely Christian standpoint. Caravaggio devoted his life to making the Jesus and his followers fully human, as that would’ve been understood in his own era. Maybe Thomas Jolly was working in a similar vein, though with an absurdly bigger budget.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell
