Silence & Silver XVI: He Who Gets Slapped (1924)
Being A Clown Is No Laughing Matter
Lon Chaney plays a man who had one really, really bad day.
His wife leaves him. His benefactor steals his research. He’s laughed out of the Académie des sciences. And he gets slapped. First by his benefactor in front of the greatest minds in the land. Then by his wife. “Fool!” she exclaims. “Clown!” The second slap breaks something inside him. He slumps into a chair, holding his face.
Then he starts laughing hysterically.
His old life gone, the man vanishes, and when we see him again, it’s as “HE Who Gets Slapped”—a famous clown whose entire routine is being slapped in the face over and over again as the crowd roars with laughter. HE has taken the worst day of his life and made it into a joke, with himself as the punchline.
There’s nothing therapeutic or empowering about HE’s routine. It’s funny—like, it’s actually a great bit of clowning that does credit to Chaney’s comic chops—but it’s also horrifying. HE is deliberately torturing himself—making a spectacle of his greatest humiliation because there’s nothing else to do with it. It’s all one big joke, after all. What can you do besides laugh?
He Who Gets Slapped is a story of humiliation, masochism, revenge, and the terrible power of laughter. Chaney’s HE is tragic, heroic, and comic all in one. The overarching theme, however, is the cruelty of the world. Director Victor Seastrom intersperses the main narrative with cuts to a clown spinning a globe and laughing. Even when HE recovers some sense of meaning in life—sacrificing himself for another—the globe keeps turning, the crowd keeps laughing, and the world is just as much of a joke as before.
So yeah, pretty big downer of a movie. No elaborate Lon Chaney transformations (he’s just a clown), no hopeful message of peace and human brotherhood. Even the gorgeous Consuelo (Norma Shearer), united with her true love at last, reflects bitterly on the laughter of the crowd—laughter she and all the other performers went right along with, because they thought it was just a joke. It was, of course.
Only the joke was on us.
Postscript: The stills from this movie (see above) make it look much scarier than it actually is. “HE” is a sad clown, not a scary clown. Unless you find clowns and silent movies scary in general, it’s the ordinary people, not HE, who will horrify you.
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