In recent days, the Montreal Olympic Stadium has been in the news: it will be closed for several months so that “exploratory work” can be carried out in anticipation of replacing its roof, an essential condition for its survival, which is more uncertain than ever. This new boredom provokes, like the previous ones, exasperated sighs and bitter sarcasm. I have always loved the Stadium, which I find magnificent, even if it is in bad shape and could use a lot of love.
I’m probably not the only one to wonder why the most indisputable of our rare architectural feats is so unloved. And I say to myself that it is perhaps because it is at the confluence of everything that Quebec is and everything that it could not be — and that it is above all this heritage which is difficult to love.
This legacy is first of all that of an era of glory for Montreal and hope for Quebec; era that Expo 67 opens, that the Olympics close and on whose tomb referendums rage. Indeed, before being a perpetually renewed failure, the Olympic Stadium is first and foremost the incarnation of the life of Montreal as an international city, parallel to the almost exploit of the life of Quebec as a country. There is therefore a positive story of the 1976 Olympics, echoing the idyll of the Expo; story whose heroes are Nadia Comăneci and Jean Drapeau and which is part of a large context: optimism.
If we easily neglect it, it is perhaps because this positive counterpart fights for our attention with so many negative elements, such as the pharaonic cost of the Stadium, its endless construction, its lack of purpose and its deplorable state. Nothing more powerfully evokes the impotence of this giant than its roof of Damocles; roof with a thousand predicted deaths; roof always patched up, occasionally torn, episodically replaced, but never well, but never satisfactorily.
However, the roof is precisely the keystone of this very ambitious architectural project: a colossal block of concrete topped by the tallest inclined tower in the world, from which was to hang a roof whose diaphanous, textile, ethereal nature would be easily removable. Unfortunately, the concrete block began to crumble before the tower was completed, and the home roof was torn apart with each of its laborious exits.
Forever without a name, simply Olympic, the Stadium is taken in its function. He is not attached to the society in which he lives; it belongs to the Games, that is to say to the past, to old disappointed ambitions. Perhaps this is why there could be no more appropriate decor than this never-closed container for Dark Ages by Denys Arcand. Through the lock of this film, we only see what is falling apart of the protagonist’s life. This declinist perspective also extends to Quebec society as a whole, since the character in question is a civil servant responsible for processing citizen complaints. So why should we be surprised that it was in the Olympic Stadium that Arcand decided to locate his workplace?
The film gives the impression that the State is no more than the manager of the complaints that its incompetence creates. Basically, it is about the exact image that a certain right, nostalgic for a certain left, has of the state apparatus, even of public life as a whole, and of which the Stadium is the perfect figurehead: “How can we explain this catastrophe other than by the incomparable incompetence of the State? How can we not conclude that we are forever doomed to go nowhere? »
This bitterness takes on its full meaning by relying as a counterbalance on the glorification of an era of which the Stadium was to be the culmination and of the failure of which it is now the symbol: the era of the Quiet Revolution, of the Trente Glorieuses ; the era of concrete and hope.
In this perspective — which is not only that of Arcand or his film, but which is also in many respects that of contemporary Quebec — the State, the engine of our collective ambitions, is the Villain without face which inhabits this castle of Mediocrity and Decline, but which we never see. As in a conventional dystopia, we come to say to ourselves: the villain does not really exist, he is only the avatar of a tradition of discomfitures which grow exponentially, who live their own lives like mold – and above all who aren’t going anywhere, like us. Ultimately, the State is Failure. Failure is the Stadium. The Stadium is us.
I say this without irony: I sincerely hope that he survives and that we finally give him the love he deserves.