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Why Dionysus On A Plate At A Drag Last Supper Is The Most Jesus Thing Ever
On the French Being French
Image from: https://x.com/Olympics/status/1816929100532945380
Let’s first take a breath. If you watched the opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics, the constant motion of it induced a kind of breathlessness. Like many Olympic opening ceremonies, it was a spectacle, an “event.”
I’ve always loved how the opening ceremonies of the Olympics evokes the spirit of the nation in which the Olympics are happening. When they’re in China, they’re very Chinese. And when they’re in France, they’re very… French.
I guess it’s no surprise conservative Christians in the United States and elsewhere would be triggered by the French opening ceremonies. Not only is there a general anti-French sentiment (Gallophobia is real) among many, but also, some of the artistic and philosophical sensibilities (Continental, as it were) rub populists the wrong way.
Of course the French are aware of this, which is why at least some of the opening ceremony worked directly with (rather than ham-handedly against) the tropes and stereotypes. In particular, some of the set pieces were in fact enactments of things in English we borrow language from the French to describe (like a ménage à trois).
Or, like the masked torch-bearer practicing parkour along the Parisian rooftops (which doubled as a riff on Assasin’s Creed Unity by a French video game-maker, Ubisoft).
Personally, I loved the whole ceremony. I loved that much of it was spontaneous, without any practice before being performed. I loved how it evoked the spirit of Paris. Over and over we kept exclaiming, “What is this? Oh, Parisians!”
It had, with the float of boats down the Seine, with the movement through the city along rooftops and through performance venues (and even through a Louis Vuitton manufacturer) a real sense of the flâneur, the image of a person of leisure in the post-revolutionary public spaces of Paris in the 19th century.
And then there was that whole guillotine song featuring for the first time a metal band in the Olympic ceremonies. Go Gojira!1
Finally, we come to the topic of this post: the drag queen last supper. This is the part of the ceremony that triggered conservative Christians, who have been in an uproar calling it “disrespectful,” a “mockery,” and “blasphemous.” Of course, this has elicited a response from the left pointing out how much of modern conservative Christian idolatry (like turning Trump into a Christ-figure) is itself blasphemous.
I’m not entirely interested in this discourse, because I’m honestly interested in what the depiction of the Last Supper in the ceremony actually accomplished. I’ll try to do this in three short but important points.
We should remember first of all that the Last Supper is inherently transgressive. Although it’s become so familiar to us that we’ve mostly stopped thinking about it, it’s genuinely bizarre that at the center of Christian practice is our consumption of the flesh and blood of our Savior. I believe there are a lot of really solid theological reasons why such transgression is itself essential and spiritually rich, but we should not blame the French for simply highlighting the transgressive nature of the meal by… transgressing.2
The meal did indeed feature popular Drag Queens from Paris, which in itself simply does what the whole ceremony did—highlight the wide cultural heritage of Paris. But at its center was Dionysus on the platter. I don’t think I’m going to attempt a complete break-down of Dionysian spirituality and how it relates to Christian eucharistic theology, but we have in front of us what the Olympics themselves decided to say about it, which was: “the interpretation of the Greek God Dionysus makes us aware of the absurdity of violence between human beings.” Well, that’s pretty great Christian theology, to be honest, with at least one of the most important theologians of our era, René Girard, emphasizing how Christ’s sacrifice (which is what we re-enact in the Last Supper) “ends” sacrifice by highlighting its absurdity. I mean, that’s a lot for a performance during the Olympic Opening Ceremony to carry, and yet there it is: the Olympics handing us some wonderfully rich (and Christian) theology.
Finally, what about the Gallophobia? To what extent, if we are predisposed to dislike the French (or French sensibilities) are we then set up to interpret French creativity in the worst possible light. I notice I had the opposite reaction (I love French philosophy and art and literature even when I find it startling or disturbing). I’m reminded of reading Michel de Certeau’s book The Practice of Everyday Life in which he mentioned walking the streets of Paris with a philosopher friend who ripped a map of Paris out of his hands and instructed him to know the city he needed to just find the way. Or I’m thinking of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, an enormous collection of cultural criticism on the arcades of Paris in the early 20th century that illustrate the same kind of love for what’s right there, in front of you, and what a city can mean on the street. That in the end is the artistic power of the Last Supper depiction. How wild to turn a bridge over the Seine into such a performative event, transgressively intersecting so much (including the absurdity of violence between us) while boats pass underneath, Iran followed by Iraq, Palestine and also Israel, the United States but no Russia, and even a small group of refugee Olympians.
Perhaps it was parody, I don’t know. But I ask you, how else can we overcome the seemingly intractable nature of violence between us without transgressing traditional notions that maintain the violence? And art that does this, isn’t it a part of Christian theology rather than a mockery of it?
This is a whole other topic, but Gojira is basically a social justice and environmental activist death-metal band.
Maybe we should also keep in mind that Paris is committed as much to post-modern art as it is to tradition. When I was in Paris in my 20s the day after we saw the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, we went to Centre Pompidou, which itself is full of such transgressive art, and on the way there we witnessed amazing street performers doing truly strange and wondrous things (my favorite were the slow motion performers).
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Reflections from a progressive Lutheran pastor in the South.
I definitely don’t think the performance was disrespectful. As I said in my post what the Dionysian meal evoked for me as a Christian was the transgressive nature of the Eucharist that is an overcoming of sacrifice in and through sacrifice. I think art can help us see our own beliefs in new ways, in this case salutary ones.
I’m reading some analysis that the depiction was itself an homage to another piece of art “the feast of Dionysus.” I don’t think this substantively changes what I’ve written but does prove I’m no expert in art history. That’s ok.