Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow
—Dreams, Langston Hughes

A voyager from another planet arrives on a desolate Earth which has seemingly gone grey and lifeless; the alien goes on a quest to remind humanity of its better nature, which ends with the rediscovery and glorious revival of the Olympics and the spirit of human solidarity. That’s the simple analysis of Thomas Jolly’s dystopian SF show at the Closing Ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics. Overall, it’s a positive message, one that honestly made for a fitting end to the two weeks of semi-euphoria that preceded it. Of course, nothing is that simple. But before dissecting it to see what hidden beauty and horrors are lying under its skin, let’s dwell on this simplistic, optimistic spin to the narrative. It’s equally important because it’s a comment on the reality France was living in just before the Olympics.

After months of political turmoil, where xenophobia and fear of one’s neighbor had gained enormous political strength, and on a day when the weather was doing its best to dampen the mood, the Opening Ceremony had started a fortnight earlier, like a reassuring mother, with the message “Ça ira.” “It’ll be fine.” Lady Gaga’s rendition of “Mon truc en plumes” kicked off a three-hour celebration of diversity that was colorful, queer, code-breaking and fearless, feting France’s history alongside its present. This, we yelled with our wine glasses raised, is France! The symbolism was powerful when, against the backdrop of the Académie Française, the Franco-Malian superstar Aya Nakamura stomped across the Pont des Arts. She mixed her linguistically brilliant lyrics with those of Charles Aznavour alongside the full band of the Garde Républicaine playing and dancing with her. This, we cheered with tears of joy in our eyes, is French! And then, through the pitch-black night, a light flickered in the Eiffel Tower. There stood Céline Dion singing Édith Piaf’s “Hymne à l’amour” as all of Paris—no, all the world—held its breath to listen. Let the rain fall, we sobbed as the Québécoise world treasure raised her fist on the final note. The raindrops turned into diamonds. Darkness became light. Despair became joy. It felt as though all of France was singing, dancing, and racing towards a future where belonging is measured by how well you love your neighbor. This is the France we aspire to live in. We hadn’t just found the Olympic spirit. We were living it.

It’s easy to see the simple, positive message of the Closing Ceremony in this sort of light, as a metaphor for France’s recent history up to July 26th. However, alongside that narrative is another one warning us of an uncertain future. From the Closing Ceremony’s first moments, hope and nihilism seem to be standing side by side. In the Tuileries Gardens, Zaho de Sagazan is singing Édith Piaf’s lighthearted “Sous le ciel de Paris.” Yet there’s sadness in this rendition. This is a celebration of things past, not things to come. This is an ending. Then France’s Olympian hero, Léon Marchand, walks up and takes a golden lamp with the Olympic flame. The lamp is small by any standards, but held by this enormous son of Poseidon, it looks as fragile as a flickering match. He carries it through the eerily empty Tuileries Gardens as the light in the Olympic Cauldron slowly suffocates into grey smoke. It’s hard not to feel like this is the end of the world. Humanity disappears singing and Léon Marchand is the last man on Earth.

Cut to the Stade de France where presidents shake hands, flags are raised and the Marseillaise plays. Gala’s “Freed from Desire” blares for an exuberant crowd as dancing, flag-waving athletes pour onto the field. The final medal ceremony, for the women’s marathon, takes place. We look at the field where a giant stage resembles cubist renditions of Earth’s continents, with an enormous Olympic medal sticking out of the Mediterranean. We shrug and say, with Gallic blasé, “Why not?” Then darkness descends and the orchestra warms up. The Closing Ceremony proper begins.

The adjective I’ve heard the most for the Closing Ceremony from friends and family is weird. They meant it, of course, as a throw-away critique of the performance. But in a literary sense, they weren’t far off. Though they weren’t using the Lovecraftian definition of the term—that is, “a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces”—weird is, as the French say, le mot juste to describe the interstellar cautionary tale which follows.

The framework of the show is an exercise in imagination inspired by NASA’s 1977 interstellar Voyager probes. The probes were sent into space with information on gold-plated records which detailed the diversity of life and culture on Earth, an introduction to the planet for intelligent extraterrestrial life. The figure covered in gold descending from the sky into the Stade de France is the representative of a species that found the Golden Record and is visiting a future Earth: The Golden Voyager.

But Earth isn’t the joyous, rainbow world we saw two weeks ago. The stage, which had initially looked like a geometric interpretation of an atlas, has become a grey, lifeless set of land masses. With no hint of natural borders, it’s hard not to see human intervention. Are these the straight lines of sea walls? Were they built too late to save the coastlines from rising oceans? Sections of the stage sparkle like a clear night sky, awe-inspiring and horrifying. It’s as if entire sections of the planet have been carved out, mined to the point where we can observe stars twinkling through holes that pierce through the Earth. The Voyager lands, dancing through fog and touching the hollow pools of stars, which swirl around their fingers. As the mist clears, the Golden Voyager discovers the round skeleton of what was once the giant Olympic medal in the Mediterranean. The metal has been stripped, leaving only a hollow frame. Everything is barren. This world is no longer a home. It resembles the sunless wasteland of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) more than it does a life-sustaining planet. Earth has been deserted. All that remains is an archeological site.

Then two figures from the Opening Ceremony, the Silver Equestrian and the Masked Torchbearer, arrive with a Greek flag which they solemnly hand to the Golden Voyager. Is this an indication that life continues on Earth? Both represent French figures of resistance and resilience, but they disappear quickly. Ghosts of a lost time.

The pace accelerates when the Golden Voyager plants the Greek flag in the ground. Lights flash, music rises, and from the France section of the stage emerges the statue of Nike, goddess of victory. But wait. Is this a statue or the bearer of a new message? One that Earth has left behind in hope that it finds an extraterrestrial archeologist? As if to answer, thousands of lights around the stadium form moving images of ancient Greek athletes as a robotic voice describes the history and philosophy of the Olympic Games. We could easily brush this moment off as a Greek antiquity refresher course, a call for peace to viewers of the ceremony; but one detail makes it more ominous. The voice describes Games that occur every four years “dans les différents capitales de l’univers.” This implies that, when this message was made, human contact had already been established with other “capitals of the universe.” Humanity might still exist. But where? And in what form? The planet that gave birth to our species is empty and grey. Where did humankind go?

Suddenly, more than a hundred figures covered from head to toe in white suits crawl out of the ground and descend from the sky. As if summoning them, the Golden Voyager is kneeling with one hand on the ground and the other in the sky. The figures jump, dance, cartwheel, and spin around the stage. But, when the Golden Voyager stands, they kneel in unison. Who are these new figures in their white bodysuits with glowing circles of gold pulsing from their hearts and surrounding their eyes? Are they the Golden Voyager’s helpers or slaves? The general consensus among the TV commentators is that they’re the last remnants of humanity. So do the figures floating down from the sky represent those who left the planet? And do those crawling out of the ground represent those who survived beneath the surface, away from the destruction their ancestors—by which I mean, us—have wrought?

Regardless, the figures split into groups, each going to a different corner of the earth, where they find more large, hollow, golden rings like the one protruding out of the Mediterranean. This isn’t just any classic use of that well-worn sci-fi trope, the Big Dumb Object. No, as the figures push and pull and try to lift the rings upright, we see that they are extracting … Yes! Five times yes! Five Big Dumb Objects! They’re extracting, of course, the spirit of the Olympics.

As the figures dive and flip through the rings, spinning around them, in them and on them, mimicking as many Olympic sports as possible, you would think this would be the end of the show. In fact, it would be hard to find much nuance to the optimistic message associated with the show if it ended now. Had they let loose some fireworks and cued a musical crescendo here, things would be simple. We’d all leave with the idea that the Olympic spirit, the best part of humanity, will endure beyond even the viability of our planet. That this can save us from disappearing.

But no. With the five rings upright on their respective continents, everything pauses. Only the Golden Voyager cocks their head curiously. From the Australian corner of the stage, the tip of a grand piano rises vertically out of the earth, its lid ripped off and the sound board glowing red like it was lined with lava. The Franco-Swiss pianist Alain Roche rises with it, playing the First Delphic Hymn to Apollo. Wearing a streaming black outfit made of old VHS tapes that hangs beneath him, he creates an image like a great column of volcanic basalt with a molten tip. He’s joined by French-speaking Swiss tenor Benjamin Bernheim, singing in the darkness. On a Franco-Swiss (why not?) platform inside one of the golden rings, Bernheim is slowly illuminated, as if Apollo’s hymn commanded that the sun rise with his voice. In a devastated world, this is both a celebratory paean and a mourning dirge. From the first lines imploring the daughters of Zeus to bring out their brother Apollo, we’re once again reminded that Earth, along with whatever’s left on it, has existed in a long darkness. There are no more witnesses to tell of its cultures, people, or even the natural outlines of its continents. Only now that another life-form has responded to our ancient, intergalactic message in a bottle can some part of our story be unearthed. The English translation of the last line Bernheim sings is “Behold glorious Attica,” a presentation of Athens to the rising sun. In this context it’s a heart-rending cry of desperation, pride, and lamentation: behold the beauty this world once contained. Behold its glory, its greatness, its humanity. Behold how we destroyed it all.

Immediately, the figures roll the rings towards the center of the stage. One by one they rise into the sky, slowly forming the Olympic symbol. And as the last ring is ready to rise, something interesting happens. The Golden Voyager seems to have disappeared from the stage and only the figures with pulsing golden hearts remain. Climbing on top of the ring before it’s hoisted up, they lock themselves into handstands and poses, turning the final ring into a sort of human compass. It isn’t just the acrobatic skill of the performers that makes this image striking. One way to see this construction is that of a moral compass pointing to the sky, highlighting the positive message inside the piece: even amongst the worst devastation, if we work together in the spirit of solidarity, if we all strive to see the good in each other, we can accomplish great things.

But some things don’t add up in that interpretation. Why are all the figures wearing the same suits regardless of whether they came from the sky or under the Earth? Apart from the fashionable look, why are their eyes framed in giant plates of gold? Why are their hearts pulsing a golden light? Perhaps this final pose, this accent placed on their function as tools to a greater good, is a clue to the nature of these figures. Are they human? Or is this an indication that humanity has become mechanized? Are these descendants of humanity, in the end, robots? Machines? Is inorganic intelligence the only kind that can survive what we’ve done to the planet?

We don’t get an obvious answer as the final ring rises. The figures form an enormous human (or not) pyramid. The Golden Voyager reappears on the top and reaches to the sky as the final ring reaches its place in the Olympic Quintet. The music hits its crescendo and the obligatory closing fireworks explode. They race in a fiery ring around the upper rim of the Stade de France like Helios charging through the sky. Light has returned to a benighted Earth.

The show ends. Musicians play. Athletes dance. Speeches are made. And finally the mayors of Paris and Los Angeles take the stage for the passing of the Olympic flag. That’s when another show begins, a second narrative that seems to refute the warnings of Jolly’s grey Earth, one saying that another future is possible. But we need a hero for the seemingly impossible mission of carrying the Olympic spirit forward. And, indeed, another voyager descends from the sky; one who has traveled huge distances to witness Paris’s athletic spectacle of liberté, égalité et fraternité. No, this is not Scientology’s alien overlord Xenu. This is his bright-eyed, all-American, ’90s dreamboat of a follower. Yes, the one and only Tom Cruise leaps from the roof of the Stade de France and rappels down to the stage. He takes the Olympic flag, motorcycles across Paris and hops into a plane headed straight for LA. After parachuting onto the Hollywood Hills, he hands the flag to American Olympians who carry it to a beach party where the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Billie Eilish, Snoop Dogg, and Dr. Dre just happen to be playing. From the incorporation of the Olympic rings into LA.’s iconic Hollywood sign to the sun-drenched jubilation of the beach party, the joyous colors are an explosive contrast to Jolly’s grey augury: a sunnier future where humanity doesn’t just learn solidarity with one another, but one where they enact it.

Or is it all a prequel? Much as the elections France had just experienced before the Opening Ceremony, with a xenophobic party inching ever closer to power, we’re on the cusp of a US election with striking similarities. In this colorful jog through LA., are we seeing an American celebration of diversity? Or is the Californian sun just a bit too bright? Are these partygoers’ wide smiles unadulterated or are they tinged with desperation? In a society struggling to pull itself out of a spiral of polarizing, tribal hatreds, are these the histrionics of joy? How easily can they descend into violence? Is this where we’ll disappear singing? Will Léon Marchand, holding that fragile flame, truly be the last person on Earth? We’ll find out in November.