SCrolling on social networks sometimes reserves good slaps. And when I say “slap”, it’s not figuratively. Because for the past few weeks, viral slaps have cluttered my Twitter feed, monster floats have been ringing out on my TikTok account, seeming to emerge from digital nothingness to impose themselves as new evidence. These are not fortuitous slaps that would have suddenly gained notoriety, like the one that Will Smith struck comedian Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars ceremony, but a real competition, on the borders of the world. absurd and gratuitous brutality.
In a scenography that is reminiscent of the film Over the Top (directed by Menahem Golan, in 1987), in which Sylvester Stallone scoured arm wrestling tournaments, two competitors in sportswear face each other, separated by a simple desk. Generally, these are good guys who could have been bouncers in a past life. Under the gaze of a referee, one of the two accomplices arms his arm and repeats his movement in a vacuum up to his opponent’s cheek, as one adjusts a sight (“One, two…”). Hands behind his back, the recipient sometimes grimaces, sometimes tenses up preventively… and “three” : under the eye of the cameras, a monumental trumpet then falls on his cheek.
The aestheticization of the violence is reinforced by sound effects: with delight, the slow motions linger on the tortured flesh, on the faces deformed by the power of the blows, on the earplugs that burst from the eardrums in a cloud of magnesia. “The actions in this video are performed by professionals trained or supervised by professionals. Don’t try to replicate them.”, can we read in accompaniment to these sequences. The slaps delivered here are so powerful that many of these ridiculous gladiators fall knocked out, some showing all the signs of concussion. The risks of serious neurological sequelae and death highlighted by specialists do not, however, deter men and women who engage in this practicewith a perplexity (why didn’t they choose ping-pong?).
Social acceptance of ultraviolence
Very popular in Russia, this discipline has its tutelary figures, such as the impressive Vasily Kamotsky, a thirty-year-old Siberian farmer nicknamed “the Tsar of the slap”, bearded 160 kilos, who trains by atomizing watermelons. But what gives this shock activity its recent virality is that the boss of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the American Dana White, after having popularized mixed martial arts (MMA), has recently infatuated with the skullcap. Cantor of the social acceptance of ultraviolence, he was able to convince the athletic commission of Nevada that we were dealing there with a “sport”, with its rules, its outfits, its decorum.
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