The use of shock and the grotesque has been an allegory for ages, but how much gore is too much? (Image Courtesy of Blog Spot)
Alexia: Hi! I’m Alexia Bailey, a sophomore here at CU Boulder. While I may just be in my second year, I’m here to share everything I’ve picked up so far, which is a surprising amount of information. “What’s Eating at Alexia” is my unofficial and unfiltered guide to some of the things that being a CU Boulder Buff brings. Think of it as your guide to navigating everything that makes CU Boulder, well, CU Boulder. Whether you’re a freshman finding your footing or a senior with “no body, no crime” level grievances about finals week, I’m here to share my takes, tips and honest observations on everything from the sometimes-unpredictable Buff Bus system to navigating campus protests (or dodging them entirely). College is a wild, unforgettable ride, and “What’s eating at Alexia” is here to make sense of some of it, one opinion at a time.
To be completely honest with you, the only way I’m surviving this semester is by rereading a lot of the books that my English teachers covered in high school while in some sort of nostalgic state. I mean, last week, I restarted “Animal Farm,” and I have to tell you that the last line of the critically acclaimed George Orwell novel couldn’t be more quintessential to this current time. Orwell wrote that “the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” The line is a warning about what happens when the people (or pigs) who once promised transformation slowly begin to resemble the very systems they swore to dismantle. There’s something very poetic about it, at least in the way that Anakin turns into Darth Vader, and we all turn into our father, no matter how hard we try. In that sense, revolution will always eventually turn into routine.
However, Orwell’s use of the grotesque is a tool that has both surpassed his time and become a norm in popular culture. Current-day films such as “Poor Things,” a Frankenstein-esque fever dream directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone, follows Bella Baxter, a woman revived through a brain transplant from a dead infant. The film swept awards season that year, earning over 120 accolades and securing Stone the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2024. It is visually stunning, narratively bold and, at times, deeply uncomfortable. But that discomfort feels intentional. Manufactured, even.
The use of discomfort to convey some sort of hidden meaning has only grown since the 2023 film’s debut. Movies like “The Substance,” “Frankenstein (2025)” and “Bugonia” have won or been nominated for the industry’s most prestigious awards, which is really saying something given that “The Substance” is an overt allegory for how horribly Hollywood treats women as they age, but I digress. But film didn’t invent this appetite for the grotesque; it just somehow inherited it. Long before Emma Stone was an alien on the big screen, writers were resurrecting corpses, corrupting utopias and turning bodies into battlegrounds on the page. George Orwell turned humans into pigs just to say that communism is bad, Jonathan Swift proposed eating newborns to critique British policy towards the Irish poor and Flannery O’Connor killed a family of six just to make a point about the importance of “divine grace.” Even my beloved Mary Shelley electrified a corpse to ask whether creation without responsibility is just another form of cruelty. The grotesque has always been less about shock and more about exposure. It drags what we’d prefer to keep abstract. Ideas like power, neglect, vanity and corruption are turned into something fleshy and impossible to ignore.
What feels different now is not the existence of the grotesque, but our comfort with it. We consume it the way previous generations consumed polite drawing-room dramas. Maybe that’s why Orwell’s final line in Animal Farm doesn’t feel like satire so much as reportage. That’s the real reason I keep returning to these books in my own strange, academic survival spiral. There’s something grounding about seeing that the chaos we think is uniquely ours has been anatomized before. That writers have always looked at their respective dumpster fires and thought, “You know what this needs? “A monster.” Because monsters clarify. They exaggerate until the truth is unavoidable. They give structure to dread. When Swift suggests cannibalism in “A Modest Proposal,” the horror forces readers to confront the cruelty of governance. When O’Connor stages the massacre in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” grace only becomes visible because it is framed against brutality.
The grotesque, at its best, is a moral highlighter. It circles the sentence in neon pink and says, “Look. Look at what you’ve become.” But it’s hard to see the highlighted sentence when the whole page and book are also highlighted. At what point should we be disturbed by the media we expose ourselves to? How much grotesque media can be made until it loses its edge?
I think a good point can be made that older works such as “Frankenstein” and even “Animal Farm” have a sort of grotesque edge that one cannot replicate nowadays. It’s not that their ideas came first, or that the writing is THAT good, it’s just the fact that the writers and readers still believed in the possibility of shock. When “Frankenstein” was published, the thought of a man assembling a body from corpses and animating it with electricity was both macabre and philosophically destabilizing. It forced readers to confront science unmoored from morality, creation without responsibility and the lack of religion in the greater context of the piece. The horror wasn’t just the gore; it was also the hubris. And in “Animal Farm,” the grotesque isn’t found in some monstrous figure but in the slow, almost polite mutation of ideals into tyranny. The pigs don’t sprout fangs. They start walking upright. What makes these works feel sharper is that they trust the reader to be unsettled. They let the grotesque sit there, unadorned and assume you’ll feel it pressing against your ribs.
Dearest reader, I truly hope that this type of writing becomes like Alyssa Liu and never loses its edge, but the more you use a knife, the duller it gets. That’s why I keep rereading these books between deadlines and existential crises. They remind me that the grotesque is about revelation. It’s about taking something we’ve normalized and stretching it until it snaps back into focus. The spring semester may feel like a slow descent into some bureaucratic fever dream, but at least the monsters on the page still mean something. They still point. They still accuse. They still demand a reaction.
And that’s my real hope buried beneath all the pigs and corpses and brain transplants: that as long as something can still make us uncomfortable, we haven’t completely gone numb.
Don’t go numb on me, Buffs.
Contact CU Independent Opinion Editor Alexia Bailey at alexia.bailey@colorado.edu
