You have to admit, the French have form for mocking religion. They were always going to. It seems pointless to decry a Queer DEI Last Supper in the city that, after all, saw the Charlie Hebdo massacre less than ten years ago for mocking Islam. Charlie Hebdo mocked all religions, especially Christianity in its naughty and impish career over the years and still does so. No fear, no favour, God bless it. And so, it has now cheerfully poked the sanctuaries of the most revered shibboleths of civic pride in ‘Paris 2024’. Sports are the civic religion, after all. Olympics ceremonies are its highest liturgies and reflect the spirit of place more than any other evocation of a nation.
The Paris ceremony organisers have chosen their battles and were careful not to offend anyone they like, or who might decide to retaliate with more than words, so it was an easy free kick to aim at Christian stuff. The French pun was too irresistible: La Cène* (The Lord’s Supper) and La Seine. The Marquis de Sade, that French institution and their main inspiration, famously wrote of ways he wanted to dis-celebrate the Eucharist, and it mostly came down to schoolboy willy-fiddling and orifice wrangling.
But you have to hand it to them: the Paris organisers found a way to get talked about and ruffle religious feathers without being killed. No-one died, but it became a little ennuyant as the rain rained on drag reine after drag reine as they pranced and twerked in their inch-thick waterproof maquillage. The river took its revenge as it was made a conduit for the athletes’ entry to the games, even as it seemed to turn upside-down and piss down relentlessly on the drenched orgiasts, athletes and spectators. Many spectators went indoors: La Seine was avenging La Cène from the heavens and they were getting wet.
Under the current dominant discourse, the Paris Olympics have become a ritual of performative ethics. More than the opening ceremony, the conduct of the games is now a demonstration of le postmodernisme, the determined and granular deconstruction of everything rational, decried as bourgeois even as the bourgeoisie rush to support their own erasure. So this was not the France of la vie bohème, but la vie d’anomie with interminable longueurs as the torch passed down endless catwalks and runways of ennui.
Paris, the city of lovers became the city of the throuple. A ménage à trois that ended, unsurprisingly enough in the overall narrative arch of the ceremony, with the girl being excluded as the doors to the love-nest closed.
The entire La Cène concept was a sooterkin of Bataille and Foucault, as French cuisine was deconstructed along with the Lord’s Supper in a Grand Bouffe with a naked Smurf. And of course, there had to be a child to worry about as a little girl stood in front of arrogant fetishists. This triumphal ascendance of Dionysian destructive excess was all expressed with Derrida’s incoherence as the can-can dancers faltered out of time, Lady Gaga’s subdued cabaret stumbled, and only the headless Marie Antoinettes and red-blood streamers properly expressed the birth of the nation with a decent metal band thudding defiance. We could have done with more of this: it was a reminder that liberation movements that begin with Bastille-storming defiance of totalitarianism end with Robespierre and – totalitarianism.
And then all this seemed a tad prophetic as global commentary exploded after Algerian and Taiwanese boxers demolished their female opponents, having claimed female status to do so despite being tested as having XY chromosomes. There had already been some disquieting signals from the Olympic mandarins ordering journalists to frame their descriptions of athletes’ sex according to the one religion that they were celebrating without reservation: gender ideology. News outlets were warned that they would be sanctioned if they referred to an athlete’s transgender status, or used terms such as ‘biological’. Commentary was to be tightly controlled, as in any other totalitarian theocracy. Jennifer Bilek, the American journalist who has been following that ideology’s money trail for over a decade, says that ‘gender identity is a technocratic religious cult and gender ideology is its doctrine.’
'This triumphal ascendance of Dionysian destructive excess was all expressed with Derrida’s incoherence as the can-can dancers faltered out of time.'
So, if some religions are more blasphemable than others, I reckon that it’s very unlikely that gender ideology will be ridiculed by the Olympic organisers. Likewise Scientology, which will likely be off-limits because of Tom Cruise helming the closing ceremony.
Which brings us to Charlie Hebdo: that honourable unsinkable jester does just that. With surgical lampoonery, its current cover imagines the closing ceremony as Queer apotheosis. It is probably a bit too naughty to describe here, but for my money, absolutely on point. (Just do a search for the current issue online and see what you think. I laughed immoderately then and I’m laughing now.) It reminds us that something in France is still alive and well, the defiant rational heart of France that gave birth to Descartes, Molière, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Vincent de Paul and La Résistance. The Charlie Hebdo cover still includes the Seine, which contained floating objects that perhaps spurred the triathletes to swim faster and get out. We were reminded of the ways in which our own shores and rivers become turbid and turd-filled from the rain flushing, literally, tonnes of dog poo and other noxious substances down the city’s gutters into their open maw. I was particularly reminded of the last time I ever swam in Geelong’s Eastern Beach pool. Someone had obviously been eating their All-Bran. Enough said.
But what can be praised about these communal celebrations of nations? There can be so much to love about Olympic ceremonies when they are worthy. I first noticed them in Barcelona 1992. Before then they were all a bit staid and boring, all speeches, line-ups and national anthems, a bit like a school prize night. Barcelona had ravished our senses in ’92 as the archer’s flaming arrow speared the cauldron alight with a matador’s duende. Athens gave us history, solemnity and moving statues. Beijing showed us that it could make a lot of people all do the same thing at the same time. London was funny, with the Queen’s parachute jump that reminded us of bravery, daring, celebrated the NHS, and most movingly, gave us Emily Sandé singing ‘Abide with Me’ for those who perished in yet another terrorist attack. And you couldn’t forget the sense of national and global oneness as the stadium echoed with Macca’s ‘Hey Jude’ and millions, even billions of tv watchers joined in the Nah nah nahs at the end.
What was good in Paris then? I found Céline Dion’s tribute to Edith Piaf moving and brilliant: you just can’t beat that woman’s tone and breath control. She is a marvel and they needed more like her. There wasn’t much else. Representing France’s wonderful culture of ballet with one lone bloke in a kilt on top of a building seemed to play down the glorious heritage of ballerinas: where was Toulouse Lautrec?
It was also weird to put a nameless lone soprano to sing La Marseillaise on top of a tower, visible and hearable only through electronic media rather than a live audience. It perhaps obscured the violent words of the French national anthem, a potent reminder of how the secular polity of France was birthed in rivers of blood. The acknowledgement of the Revolution was, I thought, good and pretty damned authentic, harking to Grand Guignol with its headless queens and red streamers bleeding down the Conciergerie where Marie Antoinette was imprisoned. A tick from me there. And the golden cauldron was good, a tribute to the Montgolfier brothers with their pioneering pre-revolutionary hot-air balloons.
But for me the best was always the 2000 Sydney opening. It was religious in the way that Anzac Day commemorations are. Remember the reverent Awakening ceremony when Yolngu elder Djakapurra Munyarryun guided the little Nikki Webster through the towering ancient history and culture of our brown land? I recall the stock whip, the rearing horse, the spiritual connection I felt at the rising of the huge image of the awe-inspiring Wandjina spirit. Sydney had it all for me: Eternity in loving copperplate, glory for Cathy Freeman and the matchless and irreplaceable Roy & HG.
God, how I miss them now.
Postscript: Roy & HG are still around, audible but invisible in their podcast 'Bludging on the Blindside' on the ABC website.
Juliette Hughes is a freelance writer.