Arguably, social media platforms operate as a kind of 21st century Bakhtinian ‘Carnival’, providing a virtual “second world”, that fosters the playful transgression of social codes, by enabling anyone to produce a range of satirical and parodic content that mocks, upends and challenges the social orderings of the world.
A genre of online content that has been shaped by the ‘Carnivalesque’ nature of social media is the ‘mukbang’, a type of video whereby an individual consumes an abnormally large amount of food, whilst interacting with their online audience. I would like to focus in particular on the ways in which Bakhtin’s theoretical concept of ‘grotesque realism’ maps onto the ‘mukbang’, by reviewing a compilation of particularly extreme mukbang videos.
(Trigger warning: there are some parts people may find off-putting)
‘Grotesque realism’ idea refers to the way that the body is used in the carnival as a site of humour and resistance through its degradation, reflecting ‘a phenomenon in transformation’. Interestingly, Bakhtin notes that the ‘stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body’, which includes an emphasis on ‘the open mouth’. This marking of the open mouth as a site of bodily transgression seems particularly pertinent to the mukbang, where it becomes the vessel through which this spectacle of excess is performed by the content creator. For example, the first creator in the video has a gaping mouth through which food is continually stuffed, his ‘open mouth’ thus becoming a symbol of the excess consumption of food. Thus, akin to the Bakhtian Carnival, these more extreme mukbang video offer a transgression of social codes surrounding eating, substituting moderation for excess, and manners of eating for a purposeful, and often playful, disregard of such codes, as creators distort their mouth to fit a significant amount of food inside. For Bakhtin, eating is one of the means through which the body exceeds its natural limits, becoming something else and exposing the parts of our own bodies that are usually relegated to the private sphere. In the mukbang, eating is the act through which these private mechanisms of the body are exposed to an exaggerated and extreme degree. Mukbangs also highlight the physicality of eating through noise, as evident by the second creator in the compilation, who loudly, slurps, splutters and spits in a messy, often playful way (indicated by his laughter).
However, as the title for the video suggests, these processes are often grotesque and uncomfortable for viewers. Nevertheless, the grotesque nature of the mukbang is arguably what produces its spectacle. Thus, despite viewers’ repulsion at the ostensibly ‘grotesque’ image before them, they are often compelled to keep watching. How, then, is social media contributing to the spectacle of grotesque realism in our contemporary culture? Are new modes of online spectatorship which provide a greater level of access to the bodies of others, pushing social media towards an aesthetic of grotesque realism?