Satan is happy with your medal count

Oh no, how will the Olympics ever cope if Rob Schneider’s not watching? The answer seems to be: perfectly fine, once it got past the stink of the opening ceremony, which I finally watched highlights of the other day. Let it be said immediately, it looked amazing; for the first time, the ceremony didn’t happen in the stadium but all across the city, and why not cos Paris is the perfect place to do that. (It was pissing with rain throughout, too, which for some reason I haven’t seen anyone mention. Somehow that made it even more impressive.) The athletes sailed up the Seine on boats. Looked tremendous. However, that highlights package was curiously quiet about the ceremony’s most controversial moment…

…namely, the Last Supper that wasn’t really.

Many viewers, including Pope Francis and Ayatollah Khamanei, interpreted the scene as a parody mocking Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper (c. 1495). By extension, they claimed that the opening ceremony mocked the Last Supper, the event Christians believe instituted the Eucharist celebration – and Christianity itself. The outrage has been so intense in some quarters that the ceremony organisers have been subject to death threats.
These responses fundamentally misinterpret the scene, which was not supposed to reference the Last Supper at all. The director of the ceremony, Thomas Jolly, was principally inspired not by da Vinci’s The Last Supper, but by Le Festin Des Dieux (The Feast of God, c. 1635-1640) a painting by Jan van Bijlert.
This painting depicts the marriage of the characters from ancient Greek mythology, Thetis and Peleus, with the god Dionysus and his satyrs dancing in the foreground. This makes considerably more sense considering Le Festin is housed at the Musée Magninin in Dijon, France. The Last Supper, meanwhile, resides in Milan (quite ironically, as Milan will be the site of the 2026 Winter Olympics).

I’ll add this video from Emma Thorne, which looks at one Christian loon response that we may take as representative of the general Christian loon reaction:

While stupid people were sputtering about a bunch of drag performers destroying their faith, organisational responses varied from the kind of cringy apology from the organisers to this rather more sensible statement from the mayor of Paris:

Anne Hidalgo is not holding back.
When religious and political officials voiced outrage in response to the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony, the International Olympic Committee chose diplomacy, apologizing to anyone who may have been offended.
Hidalgo, on the other hand, said, “Fuck the reactionaries, fuck this far right, fuck all of those who would like to lock us into a war of all against all,” in an interview with Le Monde published Tuesday, using the expletive in the original English.

Yes, madame mayor was so furious at these chuds she couldn’t even curse them in French!

Anyway, people finally calmed down, and once Imane Khelif entered the picture they could finally get on with hating other, more traditional things like women, and in the meantime the closing ceremony designers kept rewriting the end show to avoid being misconstrued so no one could possibly mistake their intentions…

…which clearly didn’t quite work, though I feel like if they were really trying to do the tarot reference the “Golden Voyager” would’ve been actually upside down… But even during the Games, some people insisted on still finding occult stuff going on:

I said the other day I’d have more from Rob Anderson, and this was what I meant: Simone Biles and her charmingly self-aggrandising “G.O.A.T.” necklace. Cos let’s be honest, if anyone’s got the right to call themselves the Greatest Of All Time, she’s got as good a claim as any after her spectacular showing… but no, this stupid cunt just had to find Satan at work, however tenuously. This is the sort of thing that it’s tempting to assume they’re not actually being serious and it’s just a Poe, but then Rob also issued his proclamation about Andrew Tate a couple of days after this and I realised he meant it. I don’t know whether this or the Tate thing is more detached from reality, but either way brother Rob is not in touch with it.

Fortunately the Games general went off well, and for a couple of weeks the good people of France could forget the recent electoral turmoil there from just a few weeks ago when some thought the country might not even have a government to oversee the Olympics… and the Games are now off to Los Angeles in 2028, where I presume there will still be a government then… although which government is obviously still up for grabs. But either way I’m sure someone will still complain about the opening ceremony being too “woke” somehow…