Directrospective: ISLES OF WONDER (2012)
Notes on the films of English director and central Smurfs antagonist Danny Boyle.
In Danny Boyle’s 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, a cast of thousands restage the Industrial Revolution, live, in a glorious, collaborative mess.
The Olympic Games are a hugely destructive force, displacing communities, inviting official corruption, increasing police violence, and massively diverting public funds, among plenty of other harms, all in the name of a two-week party for folks from out of town. As a resident of Los Angeles, which is scheduled to host the 2028 games without any public vote on the matter, it feels important to me to voice my objection to these and any future Olympic Games. In this post I’m going to gush a bit about Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics, but my enthusiasm for this show should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the Olympics themselves. These games already happened, so there’s nothing to be done about them, and I’d like to think this one arena show had comparatively little to do with the larger event’s harmful effects on the people of London. But I want to be clear: the official position of Jake Internet is fuck the Olympics.
If this sounds crazy to you, I encourage you to check out the NOlympics LA website for more on the subject.
As a televised event, the opening ceremonies of each Olympic Games include a pageant celebrating those parts of the host country’s history and culture of which it is most proud, taking advantage of the spotlight to show an enormous international audience how it sees itself and would like to be seen by the world. It’s a huge branding opportunity. There had been a steady escalation of grandeur for each opening ceremony since the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, which was the first to place the cultural spectacle portion before the interminable ceremonial bit rather than afterward. Los Angeles’s ceremony leveraged the city’s entertainment industry and cost $5 million, including among its attractions thousands of dancers, a big band medley of Broadway standards, Etta James leading a gospel choir, film composer John Williams’s now-canonical Oympic Fanfare, and a man flying in on a real jet pack. This started something of an arms race.
Beginning with the 1984 ceremony, these events were generally organized by small teams of theatrical professionals each trying to outdo the last one. Then the Beijing Olympics in 2008 blew everybody’s heads off. They had been directed by Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou, who became internationally famous in the 1990s for stunningly photographed veiled critiques of the Chinese government like RAISE THE RED LANTERN, to which democracy-worshiping Westerners would flock after China blocked their release. Then China would remove the ban and enjoy a Zhang-fueled spike in tourism. By the 2000s he had become well-known for his lavishly color-coordinated wuxia epics like HERO and HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS which paint Chinese history as a long struggle by a wise, centralized authority to protect the Chinese people from anarchy. Maybe I should do a series on Zhang Yimou, psy-op auteur.
While a production of this size requires a huge amount of organization by a team which in this case included Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee and former People’s Liberation Army Song and Dance Ensemble director Zhang Jigang, the show, in two parts titled Brilliant Civilation and Glorious Era, was thoroughly Zhang Yimou. Its sheer scale was staggering, employing 15,000 performers and Zhang’s trademark monolithic monochromatic style to project over and over again an image of massive control. Much of the show was structured around groups of 2,008 people all doing the same thing at the same time - drumming, dancing, Tai Chi, and so on. Reaction was nearly unanimous in declaring it the greatest ever It was later confirmed by a Beijing official that most or all of the participants in a children’s parade of China’s 56 ethnic groups were children from the Han majority wearing ethnic costumes. A member of the Politburo reportedly objected to a photogenic child singer’s voice, and she was asked to lip-sync to a track sung by another little girl who didn’t have the right look. Media coverage of the ceremony widely publicized the use of cloud seeding to ensure clear weather on the night of the event. Control, control, control.
2008 also saw the release of Danny Boyle’s film SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture despite being pretty lousy. Ahead of the 2012 Games, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games followed the Beijing Committee’s example and asked a British filmmaker, in this case the most recently decorated one, to direct the opening ceremony. (Rio de Janeiro followed suit, and its opening ceremony was overseen by a trio of Brazilian filmmakers, Fernando Meirelles, Daniela Thomas, and Andrucha Waddington, but the opening of the still-theoretical 2020 Tokyo Olympics will be directed by Japanese Kyogen theater performer Mansai Nomura. If the 2024 games actually happen, I assume Paris will go with Polanski).
Beyond his recent commercial and awards success, Boyle is a bizarre pick for this sort of job. The UK’s one shot to project a new identity for the 21st century is the sort of thing you’d assume they would want done with reverence and refinement. And as radical as I keep saying his films’ politics aren’t, Danny Boyle is proudly irreverent and unrefined. Particularly for a live arena show for an international audience, in which the aesthetics are the message, it’s a risky move. This is the guy who made the movie about the heroin addict who dives into a public toilet, and the movie where a Major in the British Army sets up an elaborate sex slave entrapment scheme. Bringing with him MILLIONS screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce, frequent production design collaborator Mark Tildesley, and SUNSHINE/SLUMDOG/127 HOURS costume designer Suttirat Larlarb, along with some help from composer A.R. Rahman, he came to make a show that felt like Danny Boyle made it.
Many in the press viewed the upcoming ceremony with skepticism, not just that it couldn’t hold a candle to Beijing but that letting Boyle’s wacky shtick represent the nation’s character would be disastrous. They fucked up, those people! Boyle’s opening ceremony, Isles of Wonder, would not try to outdo the Beijing ceremony, but instead offer a response to its monolithic cohesion: a big, messy, infectious polyphony.
The motherfucker is four hours long, so I’ll just hit on the highlights. Boyle starts strong. From the beginning, he’s laying out his vision of a post-modern, untameably varied Britain, with a countdown on screens inside the Olympic Stadium comprising images of numbers from all over the country, on signposts, on houses, on jerseys, on clocks, in clashing typefaces and colors. Then there is a filmed intro that follows the River Thames from its source East toward London, zooming over a silent comedy-esque sped-up and slow-shuttered English countryside dotted with athletes and children and cartoon animals, slowing down for some waddling geese - this ceremony is going to be funny - then over the London skyline, past the factory from that Pink Floyd record cover, with the soundtrack jumping all around (including a snippet of the Sex Pistols’ “God Save The Queen” that just includes the title line and cuts before “the fascist regime,” as perfect an encapsulation of Boyle’s oeuvre as any), down into the tunnels of the Underground, and finally through an unpicturesque staging area behind the stadium where performers and technicians from the show are milling around busily. We haven’t seen them do anything yet, and Boyle takes the time to foreground the people working to put the thing together, inherently coordinated but unchoreographed.
Isles of Wonder’s first two major segments are its most memorable, even if they make up about 20 minutes of the 4-hour production. “Green and Pleasant Land” brings us into the stadium where the floor has been transformed into an enormous grassy recreation of a bucolic rural England of the past. Performers in period costume play little arcane ball games and herd animals and dance around maypoles and other WICKER MAN stuff, but they aren’t all pink-faced Anglo-Saxons. In restaging this idealized English past with 2012 eyes, Boyle peoples it with the faces of contemporary England. Black and brown and Asian people who are no further from the Georgian period than any other living Britons are there right alongside the white people, all of them equally silly-looking in their weird old pants and hats. Notably the stage is not designed for the camera. It lacks a central focal point, and it’s usually difficult to tell where medium shots are taking place in relation to one another. This is Boyle’s design. It’s chaos, but it’s a wonderful chaos. No one is more important than anyone else. Children’s choirs sing the anthems of each of the United Kingdom’s four nations, England’s from within the stadium but the anthems of Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales from pretaped location footage. Forget Zhang’s dressed-up fake minority children; Boyle got these little Irish kids singing up on Giant’s Causeway.
A group of industrialists in absurd early Victorian gear pull up on a bus, led by actor Kenneth Branagh with big silly Isambard Brunel sideburns. Boyle originally cast the far less corny Mark Rylance, who had to pull out for personal reasons, but Branagh is certainly game and his broadness may read better in a huge arena anyway. From the foot of a model of Glastonbury Tor he delivers Caliban’s speech from The Tempest, which begins, “Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.” Here is Boyle’s thesis for the ceremony: Britain’s cultural heterogeneity, its lumpiness, its messiness is its strength. Be not afeard that everything will be ruined if only 2,007 dancers will hit their mark. Be not afeard that diverse cultural experiences will dilute or weaken the pure, traditional English way of life. Be not afeard of people doing different stuff from you.
“Green and Pleasant Land” gives way to “Pandemonium” as the performers themselves begin to dismantle the stage, rolling up the grass and revealing a stylized black and gray map of London. Boyle’s ceremony isn’t a seamless feat of wizardry, it’s a bunch of people working together to put on a show. Through a combination of mechanical stagecraft and group pantomime, the rural fantasy is transformed into an industrial past. The show doesn’t hide that this part looks much worse, much more chaotic, or that England is responsible for many of the technologies which have turned lovely green places into sooty, blackened ones, but it’s impressive all the same. Huge chimneys emerge from the floor and rise a hundred feet into the air. Smoke and lights suggest a snaking river of molten iron that flows into an enormous ring, which then rises, dripping sparks, into the air to join four others. This concludes Danny Boyle’s muckraking interpretive dance about the means of international sports production.
OK, it’s not really all that radical as far as actual radicalism goes. But Boyle has taken the Olympics, a cultural object whose focus is so often on achieving dominance through physical strength and whose imagery can’t ever really shake Leni Riefenstahl’s OLYMPIA, and recast it as a collective undertaking toward a common goal. That goal may be, as I pointed to in the disclaimer above this post, shortsighted and wasteful and not truly in the public interest. What this ceremony does is at least reveal and celebrate the labor necessary to the undertaking.
There are musical performances and celebrity guests, though maybe not as many as you’d expect. True to form, Boyle lays on the pop culture heavily. Daniel Craig appears as James Bond in a memorable bit in which the Queen (playing herself) appears to parachute into the stadium. There is obviously a limit to how revolutionary a work can be with imperialist avatar James Bond and the literal Queen participating, but even complicit critique is a lot to expect from a heavily supervised television event with an audience of nearly a billion people. I’m pretty impressed with this critique-flavored compliance.
Isles of Wonder’s other major feat is its fantastical acrobatic salute to socialized medicine. As joyfully loose as “Green and Pleasant Land” and “Pandemonium” were, “Second to the right, and straight on till morning,” as this segment is titled in the official programme, is a choreographed affair. And appropriately so - something like 2,000 employees and volunteers of the National Health Service dance and wheel around light-up hospital beds with “sick” children in them to form the letters “NHS,” the Service’s logo, and a crescent moon. There’s a time and place for exactitude in Boyle’s Britain, and that’s when medicine is involved. As-yet-unrevealed hateful whackjob J.K. Rowling reads a passage from Peter Pan before Boyle pays tribute to that indelible British tradition, upsetting puppetry. Giant versions, like, several storey building giant, of Voldemort and other literary villains swing around on huge cables menacing the real-life diseased children. And they’re not cutesy. These things are awful to look at. Abject. I mean it’s just fucking insane that they let him do this. It deserves more recognition as one of the largest-scale works of avant garde theater ever devised. On global television, he did this. Just to compound the spirit of solidarity, the enormous Voldemort is vanquished not by another huge puppet but by a squadron of Marys Poppins who glide in on their many umbrellas and save the children in their hospital beds. A huge and powerful wizard racist is defeated by a team of regular-sized women from the servant class. Not bad.
There’s a ton more in the show, including Rowan Atkinson (not explicitly Mr. Bean) dreaming he’s in CHARIOTS OF FIRE and a totally nutso tribute to the internet, which Boyle claims for the U.K. thanks to inventor Tim Berners-Lee. Much of this is good, if less thematically profound and moving than the opening. There’s a lot of dancing and running around and it’s all anything but monolithic; I think Boyle’s overall achievement is very well summed up by a review of the show from Letterboxd user jam: “queen elizabeth really sat there and watched dizzee rascal perform bonkers... i reached peak british pride.”
Reception for Isles of Wonder was more or less rapturous. Even most of the Tories liked it, and the ones who didn’t were told by the rest to shut up, please. The director was offered a knighthood later that year and turned it down, telling Radio 4, “I’m very proud to be an equal citizen and I think that’s what the opening ceremony was actually about.” Gotta respect that. Boyle returns time and time again to the idea of what is selfish and what is selfless, and in zooming way out from his usual stories of individual interior struggle, he ends up simply celebrating the whole big messy mob of Britain, and getting some truly unbelievably weird images on television. It’s one of the greatest things he’s ever done.
Returning briefly to Zhang Yimou’s Beijing production, I want to make clear why I think Isles of Wonder is a perfect response to Brilliant Civilization/Glorious Era. The scale and immaculate choreography of Zhang’s show is a demonstration of national unity and collective might, but not of solidarity. If an Olympics is an opportunity for the host nation to tell the rest of the world how it wants to be seen, Boyle has concocted an image of national pride that isn’t fascist and terrifying. Rather than show the incredible feats of which the state is capable as an apparatus, he shows the feats of which the people are capable individually and together. I wouldn’t suggest by any means that what the people of China need is a Dizzee Rascal house party of their own, but if that’s the kind of thing that they want, they deserve to have one, and it’s not anyone else’s job to give it to them. And let both the cute little girl who’s a bad singer and the less-cute girl who’s a good singer just sing together, for Christ’s sake.