July 27, 2012

DANNY BOYLE WINS THE GOLD

Posted by Lauren Collins

You knew from the very start—it was the London Symphony Orchestra playing a painfully tender version of Elgar’s “Nimrod”—that Danny Boyle was going for heartstrings in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. Nimrod is, perhaps, the Brits’ “Appalachian Spring.” As the “Cambridge Companion to Elgar” notes, “Edward Elgar occupies a pivotal place in the British cultural imagination. His music has been heard as emblematic of Empire and the English landscape.” Boyle had his audience at the first note, but he deepened the effect with precision-targeted imagery: geese, ploughs, maypoles, set amid a fantasy village green. As a set piece, the scene bespoke both the destiny of a Christian elect and a pagan air of festival. This was a classy way to kick things off—elegiac, but rejoicing.

The unspoken message was that Britain was an old country, a proud country—and a very different country from China. Boyle’s living diorama, as specifically-drawn a world as Middle Earth or Pandora, was the opposite of Beijing’s vague corporate bombast. You could hear the sound of a horse’s hooves clopping; of balloons being pricked, in the countdown to the start of the ceremony, a rebuke to the silent grandiosity of lights and lasers. After “Nimrod,” a lavender sky hovered over Olympic Stadium. The cameras homed in on a lone boy, his voice just summiting childhood, who began singing the other great British tearjerker, Sir Herbert Parry’s “Jersualem.” “And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England's mountain green?” the boy warbled. Boyle had already nailed it.

Then the ceremony took an awesomely downbeat turn, to the Industrial Revolution. On the BBC, an announcer explained that Boyle had deemed this segment of the evening Pandemonium, a word that was invented by Milton to designate the capital of hell. So belching smokestacks emerged from the formerly verdant earth. A troupe of a thousand soot-faced volunteers (were they these guys?) banged on drums. (The Chinese went in a different creative direction for their drumline .) As a giant forge seethed, people in kerchiefs and smelter’s bibs performed stylized versions of quotidian movements—churning butter, rolling logs. It was, I noted, Dance, Dance Industrial Revolution.

The muzzy orange haze began to fade. But, wait, who were those people in flourescent silk jackets? They were Sergeant Peppers, crowding out the mutton-chopped ironmongers and foremen. Next came a band of Chelsea Pensioners—apparently, this was the Military Coats chapter of the British experience. The next thing that happened is almost too outrageous to mention—suffice it to say, for now, that it involved James Bond (played by Daniel Craig), the Queen (the actual Queen, as everyone kept saying), and a helicopter. (If there was to be a moment of corporate bombast, it was now.) And corgis. “#tripping,” Tim Noakes wrote on Twitter. I had the window open. The entire neighborhood erupted in cheers.

The Queen was the big event, but it wasn’t my favorite part of the ceremony. You got the feeling that maybe it wasn’t Boyle’s, either, as he followed up her cameo with a sequence so wonderfully self-lacerating that you just wondered how he managed to get it past the Jacques Rogge. Rowan Atkinson—Mr. Bean—sat behind a keyboard and, pecking away with one finger, mangled the theme from “Chariots of Fire.” Exiting the stage, he (actually, what is probably the world’s most advanced whoopie cushion) made, as the British put it, “a rude noise.” The trick of this was that, by deflating the national myth of stoic heroism, Boyle bolstered the national myth of the British sense of humor.

The wonkiness of moment only underscored the grim-faced conformity of the Chinese approach. For all its modesty, the ceremony was an unusually straightforward declaration of British confidence, in its founding principles and its institutions. Boyle made this point explicitly by including a group of swing-dancing National Health Service nurses, who tucked sleepy children into neat cots. “So, Britain: two thousand years of deeply fucking odd and a lot more socialist than some people would like. Bout spot on,” Laurie Penny wrote. To much of the world, the nurses probably appeared an odd inclusion, the equivalent a bunch of D.M.V. employees showing up during a half-time number at the Super Bowl. To the British, they were a reminder of what makes them inscrutable to China, and, for that matter, to Mitt Romney.

Eventually, the march of countries began, a ritual that always feels more like a beauty pageant than a sporting event. “Bangladesh—with one hudnred fifty million people, the most populous country in the world not to have won an Olympic medal,” the BBC announcer said. Listening to her felt like attending a live reading of all of Wikipedia. “Bhutan—the last country to get television!” It was a weird parade: the French looked like Americans, in blue blazers and khakis; the Americans looked like French, in berets and foulards. We saw the Comorans, the Palauans, and the people, whatever they are called, from San Marino. The Czechs, adorably, showed up in Wellington boots, waving umbrellas.

The climax of the ceremony was the lighting of the Olympic cauldron. David Beckham, blazing up the Thames in a Notorious B.I.G.-style speedboat, passed the torch to Steve Redgrave, a five-time gold medallist in rowing, who jogged into the stadium and handed off the flaming wall sconce to seven teenagers. The teenagers lit an outer layer of copper petals, which folded inward like a venus flytrap, igniting the cauldron in a primal blaze. It felt like something one might have seen at Stonehenge.

See our full coverage of the Games at The Olympic Scene, and Lauren Collins's dispatches from London at The Europeans.

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