It was weird and all, but very entertaining and nice in that it did something new
Didn’t care for it personally, but I’m indifferent to most Olympics and halftime shows and such displays, so I also understand it wasn’t meant for me.
It’s of course impossible to reach everyone, but the opening ceremony had many things going for it appealing to a lot of different people. I was talking to a death metal fan the other day who was over his head in excitement over Gojira’s performance and how it seemed they were given artistic liberty to do what they wanted with it, not sanitized by some outsider who doesn’t understand the art.
It seems to me the opening ceremony did a great job at representing a broad spectrum of France. What offends people is not that they themselves are not represented, but rather that other people and expressions are. As if they are crying over a loss of cultural hegemony. And what’s worse, they seem to be mostly white conservative Americans crying over a loss of cultural hegemony over a French event.
It’s absurd. And it seems the director of the ceremony anticipated the outrage and chose to lean into it rather than to shy away from it, which is personally why I think it might have been the best opening ceremony ever. Because, like so many other represented groups, I belong to a subculture: The subculture of hating these stuck up hypocritical conservative self-proclaimed guardians of public morality and taste with all my guts. And that subculture was very well represented! :)