A French Farce

All across the world Christians were outraged. X was ablaze. Indignant was the tone du jour. In protest many said they would  not watch another minute of the coverage of these Olympic games. The French Episcopal Conference described the offending part of the spectacle as  “mockery and derision of Christianity”.  The opening show was condemned by all right thinking people and all the people on the right. Which of course was the point of the exercise.

Of course people of Christians were upset, and not just Christians. Of course they expressed they feelings, of anger but also of hurt. If would be silly to expect otherwise. However a reaction was what this piece of adolescent grotesquerie craved.

Deep in the psyche of the far left is an heroic refusal to accept reality. They will not conform to the world, it must conform to them. When faced with the immutable laws of economics the reaction to the world is that of an enraged 14 year old screaming at their father. That’s not Fair! I hate you! You’re not my real father! What the world saw in Paris was a teenager desperately jumping up and down in front of the adults demanding to be noticed and like a barking pup it is the attention that is important not the quality of the attention. A kick is as good as pat.

These “brave” artists were (here take your pick) Challenging Subverting Questioning Satirising Confronting Rebelling Confronting Defying and on and on and on. It is truly one of the most tedious things about our friends on the left that they must still imagine themselves as the plucky insurgents, the brave sans culottes assaying the walls of the intrenched powers, throwing themselves against the gates of the castle behind which cower the  corrupt forces of reaction. They have been in power for generations. They rule in the schools, on the television, in the cinema, the publishing houses and across the arts. Does any anyone doubt that in a 2024 redux of the Bastille we would not find the Marquis de Sade in its cells. He would be in a receipt of a generous Arts Council grant and be well reviewed in Le Monde and more when intrepid journalists would ask the proles and sans culottes why they voted for Le Pen more than a few would say they were sick of their taxes being used to support aristo perves like him.

We have seen many French folk rush to tweet, they are ashamed, embarrassed and disgusted and so they should be . It was awful not  morally but artistically. It was a festival of cliche. It was in fact not shocking or challenging or subversive at all. It was in the language of the law mere vulgar abuse. That the nation of Cocteau and the Grand Guignol should give us this poor fare is indeed embarrassing. So painfully of the moment, so awfully self aware. If there had been a coup within your local amateur drama group and a cadre of 16 year old intersectional trots had seized power I promise you this is what they would have produced.

How can we be shocked by what we have seen before? By what we have seen many times before and done better. The dominant aesthetic, and this is said not to mock but in truth, was Eurovision. If you wanted to be kind you could say that the director had obviously seen some art at some time. There were flashes of fourth hand Pasolini, Fellini, Almodovar and Daft Punk but it is 50 years since 120 days of Sodom was filmed and more than 200 years since it was written and these days we are shocked by The Bearded Woman only when we want be.

The “reimagining” of Leonardo’s Cenacolo is a case in point, it was meant to hurt not challenge. Other than the Gioconda is there any image in art that is so often the subject of pastiche and comedy? If precisely this queering of the image has not been done at some pride event somewhere in the last 40 years it would be amazing. In truth the whole thing smacked of a melange of Pride marches and Drag acts circa 1998. The lack of originality in something dedicated to creativity should the seven people concerned with the health of the French arts scene. It is an easy point of course to wonder why in deeply secular France it should be considered brave or interesting to attack Christianity and exploit the figure of Christ when other more interesting and challenging figures are available but a quiz is no fun when the answers are too easy.

There are many doomsters out there who see in this performance further proof the death of our civilisation. Maybe Paglia is right and this is just one more  fin de siecle manifestation of a decadent culture. One the night in question we saw the celebration of Dionysus and Apollo was no where to be seen. If that is so, then so it is but all in all this silly derivative show was a good thing, a very good thing indeed.

Most of the people most of the time pay no attention to those things which consume the lives of those who take part in the culture wars. Most of the people trust what they hear and read less and less. The internet by creating a space where conspiracy theories can thrive has in reaction created a scepticism where anything that on the face of it seems implausible or bizarre is dismissed as just another conspiracy theory by those crazy right wingers. Anyone who is a combatant in the culture wars in the last 10 years will tell you the truly hardest thing is to get “normal” folk to believe unadorned facts about what is happening on the cultural left.  Hundreds of millions of people across the world the sat down expecting to see a celebration of France and Sport and instead got drag queen Jesus. Millions of ordinary Joes and Josephines got to see what wonders await them in the coming Utopia and that might make things a little easier for those brave souls in the trenches now that the plain folk have seen with their own eyes what the crazy right-wingers have been warning them about for years. The cat is getting out of the bag. That is an unalloyed good.

It is reported that the “queer” director of the spectacle wished to create something that was open and included everyone. What eventuated was a most useful window into the world of the woke. Inclusivity looks very imperial, a disdainful cultural colonialism. In the 60s France exported a literary theory to the United States which evolved and metastasized into a totalising ideology and on the basis was was seen in Paris the progressive French left in 2024 has re-imported whole and undigested that ideology. In an act of breathtaking hubris a piece of theatre which they must have known would be either hostile offensive or literally incomprehensible to the large majority of the human beings was presented as an act of inclusivity. In this world language is violence so how can this be construed as anything but violent act.

Max Stirmer believed that the purpose of the Enlightenment, he probably meant principally the French Enlightenment, was the vanquishing of God and like Nietzsche after him he thought the consequence of this was to leave man as God in his place. Well the experience of the 20^th century tells us that the apotheosis did not take. Temples were built to Reason but in the end Dionysus wins the battle and rationality is just patriarchy and white privilege. Perhaps.

Of course people will have been offended by elements of the show. Feelings will have been hurt. Important sincerely held beliefs were mocked and you know, that is OK. Yes it is absolutely questionable if this was the time and place to do that. Certainly you can ask your government not to take your money to fund people who mock and despise you. Beyond the crass cliche ridden performance beyond the striving so hard to be transgressive the viewer was left with a sense of total lack of self awareness. This was agit prop made by artists living wholly in a bubble.  Watching the humourless comedy the words that came to mind were not those of Zarathustra but that other prophet of anxiety Soren Kierkegaard “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use”