Olympian Water Music

It just kept rolling along, painting always unpredictable, always alluring patterns on its surface, caressing the embankment, gracefully sliding through the shadows under bridges, not giving a French fig about the humongous fascist-inspired spectacle rampaging in, on, and around it.

In its noble nonchalance, the Seine stole the show.

As the rain bucketed down, the river’s self-portrait became subtly more turbulent. A poet prone to the pathetic fallacy might have said the river was angry. It wasn’t. Contingency plans for this cast of thousands were in place in case the current picked up dangerously in the downpour, but in the end the choreography remained unchanged.

The river wasn’t being obliging. It hadn’t even noticed the human folly all around, the bizarre ways and wants of its organizers, enactors, and spectators. True, the heavy rains overtaxed the newly completed sewers and purification system so that the water quality quickly worsened and the triathlon had to be postponed by a day. But even an uptick in E. coli didn’t vex the Seine.

Sold to the world as a celebration of difference and unity, the ceremony was a glorification of flagrant waste, abusive state power, and celebrity worship.

Like the Olympic flame, the excessive display of “cultural” and “artistic” achievement at the Olympics opening ceremony was the brainchild of Nazi Germany. Born in Berlin in 1936, the hyperbolic pageantry effectively advertised Hitler’s achievements to a watching world, all of it filmed by Leni Riefenstahl as one giant advertisement for the Third Reich. Even despite the cataclysmic world war that broke out three years later, the bastard was blithely adopted by the sporting apostles of brotherly, sisterly, and nonbinary love and has been trotted out every four years (then every two). Nazi parentage is never mentioned, though one doesn’t need to call on 23andme to discover Adolf and Leni goosestepping around the family tree.

Initially, the celebration in Paris was to allow 2,000,000 spectators past the barriers and into the grandstands erected along the Seine. That number was cut down to 300,000 while security was beefed up to 45,000, a ratio that gives a good measure of the affinities between 1936 and 2024. Another was the Albert Speer-inspired shafts of light emanating from the base of the Eiffel Tower which rose above the ceremony finale. Rather than Speer’s vertical columns conceived for the Nuremberg rallies, and those of erect stone surrounding French President Emanuel Macron and IOC President Thomas Bach in their VIP box, these luminous beams shot out obliquely through the downpour towards the sky hanging low over Paris.

Another Nazi prop of 1936, the Olympic torch arrived at its destination at the conclusion of the ceremony against the aural backdrop of the Olympic anthem. As performed by a massed chorus and orchestra, this bombastic nineteenth-century hymn confirmed that the flames of the status quo—corruption and control—burn brightly still. Hitler would not much have liked the fact that drag queens and a Black man had carried the fire on its way to the Jardins des Tuileries. In Snoop’s hand, the tapered torch looked like a giant reefer. The rapper-become-elder-statesman-of-chill was obviously serving as an advance emissary of American cannabis exports ready to flood world markets once the USA fully legalizes the pungent herb.

Down below, the Seine remained as mellow and meandering as Snoop. None of the relentless string of provocations from above perturbed the river one little bit.

Much was made of the liberated and liberating display of sexual identity whose benedictory climax came with Celine Dion’s “Hymne de l’Amour.” But the biggest thumb in the Establishment’s monocle was having French Malian singer Aya Nakamura perform her show on the Pont des Arts directly in front of the gilded dome of the Académie Française, that guardian of French linguistic purity. A member of that same academy had just lambasted Nakamura’s lyrics as “brainless Goblish”—whatever that is. Rightwing political leader, Marine Le Pen—whose name, one would think, would dispose her to aqueous entertainments—claimed that she doesn’t know what language Nakamura sings in, thick as it is with African (and worse, American) words that are now quickly—and in Nakamura’s case, lucratively—transforming the French language: “J’suis pas ta catin, Djadja, genre, en catchana baby, tu dead ça, yeah.” To add insult to industry, Nakamura was backed by the Republican Guard brass band, which served as her horn section. The chanteuse was clad in gold gladiator couture, a sumptuous complement to the starched blue uniforms of the elite corps, whose drum major was even seen to shake his bootie to Nakamura’s beat.

A drag queen Last Super unleashed perhaps the loudest rightwing uproar from near and far. Even Rudolph Giuliani, who battled kindred artistic desecrations (a crucifix in the artist Andres Serrano’s urine) at the Brooklyn Museum back when he was mayor of New York, took the time (30 seconds max) to launch an Instagram jeremiad: “Paris has lost its moral compass. In addition to the Olympic’s ignorant, Marxist, and ‘unhuman’ attack on the religion that has done more to humanize this world than any other, many of the people in Paris are very sad, angry and lost souls.”

The three-hour-plus extravaganza was a multimedia mix of live-action and video. One of these interleaved film scenes took us into a Paris apartment where a fluid threesome was in the provocative warm-up phase of their chosen event. But before the starter’s gun went off, one of the bedroom athletes slammed the door on the camera’s face. Perhaps the number of participants and their placement were winking references to the Olympic podium. Let the Sex Games begin!

The first of the star musical turns came from someone who calls herself a Lady but knows herself to be a Queen, even while the river remained blissfully ignorant of the protocols of celebrity court culture. At water’s edge, Lady Gaga sang Zizi Jeanmaire’s risqué 1961 hit “Mon truc en plumes” in French—du vrai français, putain! Trussed up in a corset, fishnet tights and elevated on stiletto heels, the Americaine took the campiness of the song’s “intoxicating feather caresses” to Olympian heights—or depths, depending on your point of view and proclivities. On a platform at the base of the stairs on which she strutted her stuff was moored a giant Steinway grand, its decal displayed like the classical music equivalent of the Nike swoosh. Steinway’s product placement of an Abrams tank. Gaga finger-synced a few notes then got back to the kicks and cuddles. I half expected the piano, a musical luxury liner almost as long as the tour boats on which the athletes were paraded down the river, to be launched into the Seine so that this Queen could be ferried hence like Cleopatra on the Nile. No, the ebony behemoth stayed put, to be schlepped back to the showroom later by invisible after-hours labor.

Later in the show, a giant puppet of Marie Antoinette was beheaded, an act that elicited more outrage. It would have been more fun to stage a David Copperfield illusionist-style guillotining of Queen Gaga on the quayside, the buoyant wax head banging a dissonant cluster on the piano keys before bouncing into the Seine and bobbing downstream while it continued singing: “Mon truc en plumes / Rien qu’en passant / Ça fouette le sang.” (My thing made of feathers, just by touching it, whips the blood.)

It had already begun to rain on Gaga, and by the time another Steinway on a bridge downriver was heard, big drops were bouncing off its closed lid. The French pianist Alexandre Kantarov—also finger-syncing with real flair—offered up Maurice Ravel’s “Jeu d’Eau,” a pointillistic cocktail served up for the old guard. However well-chosen and executed the piece, the cameras and commentators lost interest after a minute and turned back to the boats.

The last of the show’s three pianos endured a trial not just by water but by fire too. This Steinway was set on a raft floating on the Seine and crowned by flames that could not be squelched by the deluge. Nor could the pianist Sofiane Pamart, managing a part rather less demanding than what Ravel had asked of Kantarov. Like Brünnhilde in her Wagnerian ring of fire, French singer, Juliette Armanet stood alongside and sent her waifish voice over the water to echo off the stone embankment:

Imagine there’s no heaven

It’s easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us, only sky

The song also asks us to imagine a world without religion. But it wasn’t easy to imagine either possibility, since heaven was dumping down rain that approached Biblical proportions.

In one of the telecast’s baldest bits of hypocrisy, the French commentators lauded Lennon’s song as perfectly chosen for the occasion since it was an “anti-capitalist” anthem: “Imagine no possessions …” etc. etc.

To crowd cheers amplified or mixed in by the producers, we were also urged to “Imagine there’s no countries … Nothing to kill or die for.” No mention has been made of the Olympic Truce that got Russia banned from participation. Yet Israeli athletes were among the flag-waving athletes boated down the river in the preceding hours. The games are not just built on nationalism, they enflame it.

After their number, Pamart and Armanet should have rolled the piano—one of the most cumbersome possessions one can acquire— into the waters and, then, like the triathletes a few days later, swum for shore. ”Imagine” was already done in Tokyo in 2020 and has apparently now been sentenced to eternal service to the games. The rain completed the transformation of Lennon’s utopian vision into indentured Olympian song-washer.

The backlash against all of this came swiftly and on many fronts. Mastermind of the show, the aptly-named Thomas Jolly, put a happy face on the spin, holding to the line that the spectacle was an embodiment of a New France dedicated to inclusion and understanding, and hellbent on renouncing the stilted grandeur of yore.

The Seine heard none of it: not the canned clichés, not the thump of techno-dancing feet on the bridges above, not the boombox hymns that constantly slammed against reality.

Even before the show was over, the pundits and politics had started into their rants.

The river wasn’t listening to them either. It was intent on getting to the sea, even while it couldn’t stop itself from coming to Paris.

(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)