When Beijing kicked off its 2008 Olympics, the ceremony celebrated an ideal China. Sweatshops, the Cultural Revolution and the absence of democracy went unmentioned. But the West is more sophisticated — so next week’s opening of the London Games will go for the gold in historical guilt, re-opening old wounds and national self-loathing.
The July 27 ceremony, conceived by Oscar-winning “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Trainspotting” director Danny Boyle, will pay careful attention to Britain’s shame, with tableaux devoted to the denial of voting rights to women, Industrial Revolution pollution, the Great Depression and exploitation of the workers.
Instead of celebrating Nelson and Wellington, the show will feature scary soldiers “erupting” out of the ground like lava. A centerpiece will be a reenactment of a 200-mile 1936 workers’ march from the North to London to protest living conditions.
“Brideshead Revisited,” this ain’t. Call it Painspotting.
The closely guarded details of the show have been leaking out. For example, it will contain “quite a lot of ‘Frankenstein’” imagery, Boyle told Vogue. “It’ll be a Hard Truths Night,” said a headline in the Times of London.
Is this what taxpayers want their $126 million to be spent on, in an alleged Age of Austerity — the feel-bad extravaganza of the century?
In an economically depressed country where vicious tax hikes are rapidly turning the middle class into Slumdog Hundredaires, Boyle is preparing to do to Britain what he did to James Franco in “127 Hours”: Drop a giant rock on it and watch it squirm.
“It’s not a naive show,” Boyle has said. “We’re trying to show the best of us, but we’re also trying to show many different things about our country.”
Yes, by all means, let’s not confuse the Olympics with standing for the best. Why stop at the opening ceremonies, though? Instead of being so elitist as to bring the top athletes, why not just go down to the pub and pick a random cross-section of citizens?
Believe it or not, just as China 2008 experimented with artificial cloudbursts for the purpose of clearing the skies before the ceremony and leaving them bright and blue for the Games, Boyle promises an artificial downpour during the ceremony to, er, remind Britons they live in a land that is not only spiritually but literally soggy, gray and damp.
As if they needed reminding. (The Spectator’s editor, Fraser Nelson, tweeted last week of the nation’s recent downpours, “In the Bible it rained for 40 days and 40 nights and they called it a disaster. In England they call it summer.”)
Even the left-wing paper The Guardian expressed misgivings about Boyle’s choices, saying “the countryside” will be presented as “an ironic hors d’oeuvre, to be exploded and splattered over the face [of] the Olympics.”
The guiltolympics are a perfect example of how British elites — the BBC, the schools and colleges, even the film industry (which is awash in subsidies from the lottery) — shamelessly take money from ordinary Britons and use it to disparage them, their values, their sense of history and their national pride. Three generations of this have left the UK a cowering, cringing place, uncertain of its future and defensive about its past.
The ceremony will reportedly conclude with Sir Paul McCartney singing “Hey Jude.” Don’t be surprised if Boyle orders him to change a key lyric to, “Take a proud land, and make it worse.”