La Cène sur la scène sur la Seine malsaine était obscène
Now that this jeux de mots is out of my system, let me vent about what bothered me about the Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Olympiad, which I watched on CBC and Radio Canada.
First, there was the inane commentary, in both official languages, and the disjointed jumping back and forth, between the 12 tableaux or artistic performances representing France and the parade of countries, with athletes floating down the Seine on barges.
Liberté, the third tableau showed a decapitated Marie Antoinette singing Ça ira:
Ah ! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
Les aristocrates à la lanterne
Ah ! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
Les aristocrates on les pendra
For those whose French language and history may be a little rusty, Marie Antoinette was the young Austrian archduchess Maria Antonia, married off at age 14 to the future king of France. She became Queen of France at 20, when Louis XVI acceded to the throne. Seen as an outsider by the court of Versailles, she was nicknamed Madame Déficit by the revolutionaries. After the overthrow of the monarchy and execution of Louis XVI. Marie Antoinette was put on trial for essentially bankrupting France. She lost her head to the guillotine in 1793, nine months after her husband.
Ça ira is one of the songs of the French revolution. Its refrain, sung by the headless figure of Marie Antoinette at the Opening Ceremony, proclaims that all will be fine after the aristocrats are strung up from a lamp post and hung. The tableau featured the heavy metal band Gojira playing from platforms suspended from the façade of the Conciergerie, the prison where Marie Antoinette was held. The scene finished with what looked like an explosion of blood from the windows of the Conciergerie.
Liberté was followed by tableaux Fraternité and Égalité, to make the motto of France.
Tableau number nine was Festivité, featuring the much-commented depiction of da Vinci’s Last Supper. I realise much ink has already been spilled and I am late to the party with my comments. Because its defenders advance the argument that it is mainly Catholics and U.S. conservatives who are shocked by this segment, I took the time to read commentary in Czech, one of the languages in which I am fluent. The Czech Republic is in the top ten of the world’s least religious countries, with some 72% of the population declaring itself either non-religious or atheist. The iDnes.cz news portal’s survey of readers found that 62% (16007 readers) did not like the Opening Ceremony. Deník.cz qualified it as “Extrémní dno, transgender výsměch” [Extreme bottom. transgender mockery], Novinky.cz “Noční recitál střední školy” [High school evening recital], and Lidovky.cz had a headline “De Coubertin obětí pokroku. Důležité je zabít oponentovi posvátnou krávu, urazit a ranit ho co nejvíce” [De Coubertin victim of progress. The important thing is to kill your opponent's sacred cow, insult and hurt him as much as possible]. Comments gleaned from social media include nevkusné [tasteless], festival bizáru [festival of the bizarre], megasviňárna [mega bullshit].
Da Vinci’s Last Supper is, along with the Mona Lisa, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and van Gogh’s Starry Night, among the world’s most recognised works of art. One does not need to be an art afficionado to have seen a reproduction. It is impossible to miss that the ninth tableau of the Opening Ceremony referenced this, and not some other, work of art. To pretend that it did not, as was later claimed, is simply gaslighting the public.
Da Vinci’s masterpiece shows Christ’s last meal with his disciples, before his death on the cross and resurrection on the third day. Not to belabour the obvious, the last supper instituted the Eucharist in which Christians, be they Protestant, Orthodox or Catholic, believe Christ is present.
To falsely claim, as the organisers of the Opening Ceremony did, that the Festivité tableau referenced Dionysos is disingenuous. The ancient Olympic Games were a religious ceremony in honour of the god Zeus. They took place at Olympia in the Peloponnese, at a temple dedicated to Zeus. There appears to be no connection whatsoever between the Olympic Games and Dionysos, god of wine, festivity, ecstasy, fertility. Dionysos was honoured at Athens at festivals that showcased theatrical performances, among them the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The cult of Dionysos, when brought to Rome, gave rise to the Bacchanalia. In contemporary parlance, a bacchanal is a revel, a crazed and drunken party or orgy.
The next tableau, Obscurité, featured a rendition of John Lennon’s Imagine, supposedly a hymn to harmony and unity. Imagine promises a future with no heaven and no hell, which is to say no right or wrong, no values. No countries and no religion, meaning no political and social structures, and no possessions; only a brotherhood of man. When we have done away with private property, morality, and all structures that organise society, we will have achieved communism. As Comrade Lenin put it, when there is freedom, there will be no state.
How to understand what was shown during the Opening Ceremony? Obscurité, Festivité, Liberté give us the answer. Obscurité is the telos, the utopia of communism:
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
…
And the world will live as one.
How will this world be? Festivité offers some insights. The Last Supper and the bacchanal are connected, since the bacchanal represents an inversion of the social order. Christianity is mocked, but being at the core of Western civilisation, it is not just Christianity, it is the whole of Western civilisation that is turned on its head. Transgenderism is deliberately subversive, because it undermines the binary categories of male and female. The body is our anchor to objective reality and the fundamental male-female binary is an embodied conceptual category. To mess with it, is to mess with logic and reason itself, given that it is impossible that a thing at the same time be itself and its opposite. Alternatively, were this to be the case, we descend into non-reason, madness.
The sorry spectacle of the fat woman with the halo who represented Christ at the last supper, the bearded transvestite, the blue Smurf-like personage, the actor lasciviously dancing with a child, were a festival of the bizarre, an obscene parody. That it was by design cannot be doubted, as the since-deleted self-congratulatory posts prove: “Oh yes! Oh yes! The new gay testament!” and “ Une mise en Cène LÉ–GEN–DAIRE” posted by France TV.
The words forgive them, for they know not what they do come to mind.
But I fear that they know exactly what they do, because Liberté shows us how their communist woke utopia will to be attained. One would have thought that following Bataclan, following Charlie Hebdo, following Fr. Jacques Hamel and Samuel Paty there would be some reticence to show a scene of decapitation. One would be wrong. My interpretation of Liberté is that it references the future as much as the past. In the upcoming class war, the new aristocrats, the new enemies of the people, will be the white racist oppressive colonisers. When they have destroyed Western civilisation and reason itself, the woke mob will come for our heads.
What do you think? Please let me know.