Opinion | The dark message of the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremonies
The term “frank” is of course French. It comes from the Old French word “franc,” and the medieval Latin “francus,” meaning “freely, uninhibitedly outspoken.” That’s what this presentation aimed to be with its challenging imagery — blood and fire were everywhere. Usually, the Opening Ceremonies are candied and cloying, with hackneyed sequences of stuffed-animal mascots dancing with children, and the ever-obligatory chrysalis and butterflies. Sometimes these things go entertainingly or queasily wrong. Doves were grilled alive in the cauldron of the Olympic flame in Seoul in 1988. A giant baby formation in London in 2012 looked more like a swollen monster in a sand dune, and most notoriously, in Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Games, thousands of pigeons were released only to be startled by cannon fire.
This was purposefully disturbing. There were no pixies prattling songs about peace in Paris. The Conciergerie, prison to Marie Antoinette, spouted ribbons of blood and red smoke from its windows, while a metal band clanged like iron doors slamming. The subjects of great paintings burst out of the frames to peer like inmates from windows of museums. An armored horsewoman, one part Joan of Arc and one part robot, clattered down the Seine as if charging to battle, bearing — the flag of peace?
John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Imagine” played on a piano in flames. The pages of great works were torn from books and thrown into the wind. Human puppets swayed over a Pont like wraiths of those who had been staked there.
Dashing through it all was the torchbearer, his identity unknown. He was meant to be an amalgam of French characters and totems: the Man in the Iron Mask from Dumas, the Phantom of the Opera, Ezio from Assassin’s Creed, the wolfishly named thief and master of disguise Arsène Lupin, and Belphegor, or as Victor Hugo described him, Hell’s Ambassador. All of them fugitives from autocratic imprisonment or isolation in deep chambers, ostracized as monsters in belfries and underground cisterns.
France’s literature, music and philosophy are drenched in this stuff — idealists crushed at the barricades, bayed to death by Javert fanatics or head-seeking throngs, driven to dungeons from which they seek to break out into open air. This culture does not lend itself to cloying clichés. There is no escaping the buried truth of it — especially during this Olympics, an exercise taking place right on the cobblestones. By the way, there really is a large hidden lake beneath the opera house.
The Olympics are not especially truthful exercises, apart from the feats and emotions of the athletes. The Olympic Truce? Surely that’s a joke. The Games have become the world’s largest marketing mechanism and a safehouse for dictators’ dirty money. The International Olympic Committee has functioned as financier and enabler of autocrats with world-destructive designs as bloody-minded as any historical tyrant. The Sochi Games of 2014 provided lovely cover for Vladimir Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea.
And yet — the truce can be real. The ancient “Ekecheiria,” the original truce among Sparta, Elis and Pisa to allow safe conduct for the Greek city-states to compete in and watch the games, was not a myth. It was brought back in 1993, in the form of a United Nations resolution. And it has held, for the most part.
In any other place or year, the Olympic Truce would seem like another ceremonial banality or marketing trope, cheap as a fabric butterfly. In this one, it seems as needed as one of those operatic voices from the balconies and rooftops over the Seine.
Paris is the most direct challenge to the truce in more than a half-century, since the still grief-inducing 1972 slaughter of Israeli athletes in Munich. Can you hold an urban Olympics amid multiple wars, in a city teeming with contingents from all sides, including some of the largest Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe, at a time when threats have multiplied and perhaps are no longer containable? A belligerent state like Russia launching a shock invasion seems a neat problem compared with the overflowing extragovernmental actors shouting…
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