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From Scientist to Clown – He Who Gets Slapped 55
This could indeed be interpreted in relation to Sjöström’s change of production
culture, from Europe to Hollywood – a remark that is most relevant also in the
context of this study. The clown, indeed, might be interpreted as a tragic hero in
a changing culture of images, struggling in vain to find his new identity in a
new, globalized production context. However, in the even wider perspective of
a film essay on the conditions of life on the globe that has been outlined here,
the dissolve also opens for yet another interpretation. When the globe is dissolved
into the circus ring, this, on another level, also seems to imply the more
general analogy of a global circus; the circus: as metaphor for life itself. The
necklace and the garland of flowers, on the other hand, appear as opposites,
but also as metonymies for the people handling them; on one hand, the greedy
Baron and, on the other, the unselfish lover. It is left to the viewer to draw the
conclusion that the value of the garland is higher than that of the pearl necklace,
that true love is more valuable than wealth without love.
The Question of Whitefacing
If the metaphor of the globe might thus be read in different perspectives, it
might nevertheless be worth to follow up more consequently the more specific
discussion on Arne Lunde’s reading of the film, as he situates his analysis precisely
in the intersection between the two production systems, Sweden and Hollywood.
Lunde interprets the film by discussing, as the subtitle to his essay
reads, “Ethnic Whiteness and Assimilation in Victor Sjöström’s He Who Gets
Slapped.” 33 That is, as it turns out, “by examining the film’s underlying thematics
of transnational hybridity and the performance of whiteness”, as“an
allegorical exploration of the terrain between ‘Sjöström’ and ‘Seastrom’”, a selfreflexive
assessment of “the director’s own (re)assimilation into American identity
in the 1920s” through Beaumont’s “self-reinvention through the performance
of ‘whiteface’”. 34 According to Lunde, “Seastrom’s thematic manipulations
of clown whiteface point to a more complex social dynamic –‘whiteface’
as a self-conscious practice of racial masquerade, passing, and assimilation”,
just as Jewish or Irish immigrants used to “black up” themselves “in order to
paradoxically ‘become more white’ in Anglo-Protestant America”. 35
By citing a number of historical sources, Lunde first quite convincingly argues
that Scandinavian ethnicity had to “become” white, or to claim whiteness,
in America. Lunde’s examples, however, are all quite general and concern
American society as a whole rather than in a more specific context. Thus, the
question is whether this may be generalized to the extent that it automatically
includes He Who Gets Slapped, insofar as this film uses – as stated in a pre-