Olympic opening ceremony critics missed some golden opportunities

Olympic opening ceremony critics missed some golden opportunities

By: Rachel Marsden

PARIS – Viewers around the world have suddenly taken an interest in French history as a result of being shocked or offended by the Olympic Games opening ceremony.

But seeing something bizarre and wondering what the creator was thinking is the whole point of art. It’s what curious people do all the time during visits to galleries or museums. No one goes to Rome and has a fit because the tour guide delves into the cultural explanation for why all the statues have tiny wee-wees. How about looking a bit deeper?

Take the heavily criticized “Last Supper” scene with drag queens replacing Jesus Christ and the disciples, and a tubby, nearly naked blue Smurf-like figure lounging in a giant fruit bowl on the table in front of them. What does it have to do with sports? Not much. Is it offensive to Christians? Clearly. But playing with that particular fire is now as much of a part of French identity as baguettes and labor strikes.

“Je suis Charlie” (or “I am Charlie”) was the free speech rallying cry of the French masse s heard worldwid e in the wake of a deadly massacre by gun-toting terrorists in January 2015. The attack targeted the Paris-based magazine Charlie Hebdo, which routinely pushes the limits of freedom of expression by refusing to exempt any religion from its satirical practices. A few years later, in October 2020, Samuel Paty, a suburban Paris high school teacher, was beheaded in the school’s parking lot after bringing up the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Prophet Mohammed for class discussion.

Macron has routinely refused to condemn the cartoons in question – including during a visit to Muslim-majority Lebanon. “There is in France a freedom to blaspheme which is attached to the freedom of conscience. I am here to protect all these freedoms,” Macron said.

From here, there’s a legitimate discussion to be had about whether France is truly a free speech absolutist country. While religion may be fair game, there are still hate speech laws in which even journalists have been caught up.

France’s blasphemy laws were abolished two years after the French Revolution, which was depicted during the opening ceremony by another scene that has elicited confusion and gasps outside of France. Set to a live performance by French heavy metal band, Gojira, a woman in a red dress was seen holding her own severed head at waist-level while singing the French Revolutionary hymn, “Ça ira.”

That would be Marie Antoinette, former Queen of France, who was intimately introduced to the guillotine by French people fed up with her and her fellow ruling elites. Suggesting that she was merely a wife and mother who was murdered, as some argued online, is a bit like bringing up the notion that Adolf Hitler loved his dog, Blondi.

There’s a debate to be had here about how the once revolutionary leftists have now become the establishment’s enablers.

Another scene featured three young people running off for what looked like a threesome. On the surface, it might elicit an eye roll and a joke about how the only real surprise is that the “ménage à trois” or “throuple” hasn’t yet officially been included on UNESCO’s World Heritage list like the French baguette in 2022.

But it’s really just a nod to Henri-Pierre Roché’s novel, “Jules et Jim,” and the basis for a famous film of French New Wave cinema, which influenced Hollywood giants like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Francis Ford Coppola. So has France’s soft power cultural influence on America been good or bad? Similarly, viewers stopped at noticing that the faceless acrobatic torch-carrier looked like the main character from the Assassin’s Creed video game — and didn’t look any deeper to learn that its creator, Ubisoft, is French.

And one may have been annoyed by French-Malian singer Aya Nakamura’s performance, riddled with auto-tune and barely decipherable French language lyrics as she danced around grabbing her breasts, musically accompanied by the French Republican Guard, a unit of the French Gendarmerie, in what came off as an affront to authority. She emerged from the Académie Française building, which houses the institutional gatekeepers of the French language — and proceeded to take a linguistic wrecking ball to it.

But maybe someone outside of France has just learned about this institution’s very existence. The message was clear – that language evolves, despite the establishment’s best efforts to control it.

Much of the show was gratuitously peppered with drag queens. This isn’t even provocative anymore, frankly. A drag Queen from Austria won Eurovision a decade ago, and a French one just commented on the event for French audiences earlier this year. Yawn. How conventional. How utterly boring.

The argument to be made here is that people have been tuning out from mainstream entertainment because of the heavy-handed “diversity” being shoved down their collective throat at the expense of decent entertainment. And that’s exactly what happened with this ceremony. The Olympics are already inherently diverse, with people of all colors, creeds, backgrounds and orientations earning their presence at the Games on merit. Showcasing the athletes is enough. But instead, they were almost a backdrop, crammed into boats with several nations together like they were all piling into the last cab available after the nightclub closed.

Canadian Celine Dion’s already iconic rendition of Edith Piaf’s “Hymne à l’Amour”, did more than the entire rest of the ceremony in uniting the world in raw emotion. No gimmicks, no politics, just pure talent. A tribute to Olympic-grade meritocracy that transcends time and borders better than any virtue-signaling ever could.