Paris, France the Brand, the Theory - the Olympic Opening Ceremonies

A spectacle created for the camera, the tourist books, the television viewer, the YouTube/Tik Tok clip

The 2024 Paris Olympic Opening Ceremonies have attracted a deluge of criticism from conservatives. They called the inclusion of the Drag Last Supper and some people dressed as goats or satyrs blasphemous and Satanic. You could say the whole debate is a tiresome culture war type conflict with altar boys pitted against theater kids. The theater kids won, but the altar boys have deep resources with Opus Dei and the European Far Right tut tutting about the fall of the West.

Let me organize my thoughts about the invention of Thomas Jolly, the director of a small regional theater, catapulted to international and national prominence when he was chosen to direct the four hour extravaganza that marked the end of France as a country, the full apotheosis of Paris as a brand.

Here in no particular order are some thoughts about the extravaganza, which paralyzed the city and made it into a pure image for global consumption, as if Paris needed that last coup de grace of grotesque spectacularization of the city as pure image and marketing opportunity.

1. Paris and France market themselves as luxury brands, ready to be sold off in pieces, cut up and stuffed into a Louis Vuitton trunk, featured prominently in a video montage hailing “craftsmanship.” Imagine if the Los Angeles Olympics decided to market itself through the logo of the U.S., private equity behemoth Blackstone Group, because LVMH is the most valuable European company and Blackstone is the biggest private equity firm. Blackstone: because we care! Imagine if we were treated to a montage of FoxConn IPhone factories at the Beijing Olympics: FoxConn because we can make complicated electronic devices on spec for a fraction of what it would cost you anywhere else in the world!

2. The Angel of history is playing the accordion, dressed in a fisherman’s striped shirt and beret and wings. Why wasn’t he also carrying a baguette? Can’t find a picture of him.

3. The 2024 Olympic Logo features a feathered bangs, ear hugging bob, a popular haircut in the 1990s and early aughts, best worn by Mary J. Blige. Puzzling what it had to do with Paris or athleticism. I can only imagine it was ‘feminist’ in some weird way.

4. The center of Paris was completely locked down, making north/south trips in the city impossible to negotiate; security was the reason given. The bateaux mouches carrying the athletes grumbled down the Seine, without anyone bothering to coverup their advertisement of their tour packages: these boats evoked not so much athletic feats as much as a century of overwhelmed, perhaps lactose intolerant tourists, once German, now Chinese and Korean taking photos of the Grand Palais from behind the safety of a thick pane of glass.

5. Lady Gaga gives a burlesque performance, cementing in everyone’s minds a colorful and sanitized version of the burlesque shows and theaters centered on the Rue St Denis and Pigalle. There was also a long line of can can dancers, swinging their legs behind ruffled skirts. Feathers, sky high heels, a hint of sex work? All this is fun I guess, except that these shows and the brothels that populated these areas catered to the young men of the bourgeoisie whose Catholic peers would not dream of sex before marriage.

   

   The doomed courtesan becomes a figure of 19th century romance, from opera to ballet: Carmen. Today bohemianism’s excesses have been cleaned up for the consumption of the Professional Managerial Class. I thought this was the ‘woke’ ceremonies so why would we celebrate the actual hostility to female sexuality that was on display in these neighborhoods of Paris. To walk alone as a woman down the Rue St Denis or in Pigalle until it became gentrified was to run a gauntlet of male solicitation and degradation.

6. The street battles fought in Paris in 1789, in 1848, in 1871 were all framed as aestheticized versions of some theater kids idea of revolt: choreographed by Andrew Lloyd Weber, not Victor Hugo. French revolutionary history reinterpreted for the society of the spectacle. The French lean into Les Miz.

   

7. But Paris has intellectuals! Who read in libraries!!! But they are also theater kids, looking up over their Gallimard edition of Philosophy in the Boudoir in order to entice some fellow fake book lovers to engage in a menage a trois on the mezzanine. Reading can lead to sex! This was an important message of the 18th century libertines, but made theater kid/US State Department friendly.

8. Live events are meant to transmit the excitement of the viewers present to the viewers who have to watch through cameras and broadcast media: the Opening Ceremonies were made for no “live” human eye. From the passing of the torch to the passage of the boats: everything had to be edited to make sense to a televisual viewer. The final spectacle of the Eiffel Tower lit up was cross cut with a group of tracksuit clad athletes lighting a giant gold balloon on fire. The athletes had run through the Tuileries, the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde, completely emptied of human beings and traffic. It was a COVID lockdown Paris that was evoked.

9. Finally, this all leads me to thinking about French Theory, also a luxury brand of philosophy, repackaged by academic tour groups who wanted to escape the provincialism of the post-World War II American intellectual scene. Decontextualization and speculation were its most powerful strengths. Frenchified Heidegger and Nietzsche were super seductive, especially if you thought the Humanities had been monopolized by the tweed wearing, elbow patched Chaucer specialist who made you memorize the Canterbury Tales — in Ye Olde English.

10. Just as a reminder, rural France has been decimated by decades of fiscal austerity. Macronism has made France a pale imitation of the U.S., with private equity funded luxury in Paris and poverty and unrest on its edges.

11. Thomas Jolly, born in 1982 has no memory of what Paris might have represented for the early twentieth century thinkers like Walter Benjamin, who praised the city as the capital of 19th century modernity, capitalism and commodity culture.

    

    The city is still there, gritty, filthy, fascinating, but its image is pure commodity, pure representation with its history and the history of France destroyed for the pleasure of the American Empire. Because that is what the Opening Ceremonies were really catering to: the liberal American consumer/tourist, with their ideas of Parisian luxury and decadence, gilded with excellent U.S. friendly identity politics. What a world we live in.