This weekend on Forbes.com, “
LondonOlympics: The Most Embarrassing Opening Ceremony?” was not intended to represent the American reaction to the event. Unlike many other commentators here and around the world, I was not thinking about Danny Boyle, or the budget or any of the back story. I just watched it.
And I found it hard to watch. Not because I am a hater or an enemy of inclusiveness. Not because I am a fan of the Chinese Communist state and value conformity. Not because I am ignorant of England’s contributions to world culture. Quite the opposite on all counts.
I found it hard to watch for some of the same reasons that many in England loved it. I thought the that there was a sharp distinction between the “ produced” bits and the “crowd” bits. Some of the high-production elements worked for me (007, the Queen and her corgis, Beckham in the boat, the final Olympic rings fireworks) but I found the choreographed crowd actions to be cliche, disjointed and amateurish. Mass movement does not necessarily constitute a performance. (In fairness, some of the American reaction, including my own, was shaped by NBC’s poor editing of the event. Many comments reported that the BBC did a far superior job, which I do not doubt.)
London has become an important hub of contemporary art and there are many contemporary artists who create performance works for large numbers of people. The Tate Modern itself has staged all manner of large-scale art experiences in their vast Turbine Hall, so there is no question that England has the intellectual and cultural capital to have done something truly forward-looking.
Because I was reviewing the event as a “content experience” I did not share the same contextual frame that the news industry used to prepare the public for what they were going to see. Many viewers, particularly in America, had a similar reaction to mine and felt that the coverage didn’t reflect their experience of the event. For them, my story was refreshing and validating.
But for people who genuinely enjoyed the spectacle, I’m afraid it seemed mean and small minded. I have read all of the more than 300 comments and replied to as many as I could intelligently. Perhaps 80% of them agreed with me, often hilariously so. A small number took me for a rude person and responded in kind (and then some!) Many of those that disagreed took the time to explain why.
Having taken that all in, I have to say that I think the ceremony did expose some cultural rifts between our two countries. Specifically, England, in fact, has a deep tradition of amateurism that is very much part of its identity.
Atul Gawande expressed this very clearly last year in his article “Personal Best,” in the New Yorker:
What we think of as coaching was, sports historians say, a distinctly American development. During the nineteenth century, Britain had the more avid sporting culture; its leisure classes went in for games like cricket, golf, and soccer. But the aristocratic origins produced an ethos of amateurism: you didn’t want to seem to be trying too hard. For the Brits, coaching, even practicing, was, well, unsporting. In America, a more competitive and entrepreneurial spirit took hold.”
These are Gawande’s words, not mine, but reading them helped me to understand, perhaps, this gap I have been experiencing after writing about my reactions to the ceremony. Not that I represent America, or am a “typical” or “mainstream” American in any way. I’m not. But, by gum (to sound American!), my reaction to this would seem to come from an internalization of that more professional approach that Gawande (an American physician and journalist) ascribes to our country.
What that means in terms of the ceremony is that what I found sloppy and amateurish, the Britons found charming and quirky and representative of themselves in all their self-deprecating glory. It’s not that I wanted or expected it to be robotically perfect like the Chinese in 2008, but I missed the new British spirit that I felt when I was in London last summer. For all of the ways that England has become a radically more diverse society, the rigidity between high and low is more tightly integrated into its culture than in the U.S..
Now, the actual income inequality in America is huge and growing, so I’m not holding the U.S. above the U.K. as actually being more democratic—but we (deeply) think of ourselves that way. It might have something to do with that Revolution a while back that was based on overturning perceived tyranny.
That all being said, I think that the Americans that were disappointed in the opening ceremonies (myself included) were expecting something more brilliant than the retrospective mashup of recent British (pop) culture that we got. It was more like a bad Broadway musical than a unique performance that could have only been imagined in England. We were expecting what the host’s great artists and writers, musicians and designers, filmmakers, engineers and performers can deliver: Intelligence, incisiveness, discernment and craft. In short, a vision of the future better than our own.
[Note: These shows diversity of opinion ]
