Nordic Exposures: Scandinavian Identities in Classical Hollywood Cinema

2. Scandinavian/American Whiteface - Ethnic Whiteness and Assimilation in Victor Sjöström’s He Who Gets Slapped

38 two Scandinavian/American Whiteface Ethnic Whiteness and Assimilation in Victor Sjöström’s He Who Gets Slapped  w hile the viking appropriated the vinland sagas to shore up biological and essentialist concepts of Nordic whiteness in the “discovery” of America, other silent-era films in 1920s Hollywood cinema engage more directly with Scandinavian whiteness. As this chapter argues, He Who Gets Slapped selfconsciously allegorizes and “makes strange” Scandinavian racial and ethnic identity through the auteurist sensibilities of its Swedish émigré writer-director, Victor Sjöström. One of European silent cinema’s greatest artists, Sjöström immigrated to Hollywood during a decade in which the American film industry first actively courted competing talent from overseas. The Scandinavian film colony in Los Angeles would at its height in the mid-1920s also include émigré directors such as Benjamin Christensen and Mauritz Stiller. The colony’s actors would most prominently feature Stiller’s protégée Greta Garbo, Einar Hansen, Lars Hanson, Warner Oland, Nils Asther, and Anna Q. Nilsson (all from Sweden), as well as Jean Hersholt and Anders Randolf from Denmark, and Greta Nissen from Norway. A 1926 issue of Photoplay magazine scandinavian/american whiteface 39 called attention to “the little Scandinavian colony at Santa Monica, where an American is a foreigner” and to the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio in Culver City, where “the Scandinavians seem to be having it all their own way.”1 Another Photoplay issue termed the phenomenon “The Swedish Invasion” and further trumpeted that “America is rediscovered by the Norsemen and Nordic talent gets strong reinforcement.”2 As many film scholars have argued, Hollywood wanted European directors for their distinctiveness yet tried to assimilate them into American studio style and practice at the same time. He Who Gets Slapped (1924) is generally regarded as Sjöström’s most “European” film in Hollywood, mainly because of its Parisian milieu and its expressionist Scandinavian colony at mgm, December 1925: (from left) Benjamin Christensen, Victor Sjöström, Lars Hanson, Max Ree, Karin Molander, Karl Dane, and Mauritz Stiller. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.] 40 chapter two and symbolist elements. I would like to revise this appraisal by examining the film’s underlying thematics of transnational hybridity and the performance of whiteness. The film needs to be read as an allegorical exploration of the terrain between “Sjöström” and “Seastrom” (as the director was renamed by mgm in Hollywood). Its European circus genre setting has obscured the film’s thematic obsessions with hybridic identity , self-reinvention, and cultural doubleness. In my reading of the film and the conditions of its production, Sjöström radically adapts and reimagines Leonid Andreyev’s 1914 Russian symbolist play He Who Gets Slapped (Tot kto poluchayet poshchechiny), as a deeply personal exilic narrative that expresses his own conflicted “foreign émigré/native son returned” situation in the United States. While Andreyev’s play took place entirely in one backstage set and never really explained who the clown “He” might have been earlier, Sjöström’s scenario entirely invents a back story and motivation for “He”—through the traumatized and exilic character of scientist Paul Beaumont. Beaumont’s transition from fallen intellectual to public entertainer, and his self-reinvention through the performance of “whiteface,” self-reflectively express and critique the director’s own (re)assimilation into American identity in the 1920s. how the scandinavians became white In order to contextualize more fully my interpretive textual reading of He Who Gets Slapped, however, I wish now to engage the larger culturalhistorical questions of whether Scandinavian ethnics had to become white in America. The unrestricted influx of immigrants to the United States as a source of cheap labor for its rapid industrial and agricultural growth had increasingly (from the 1880s onward) provoked racist and nativist backlashes. A national political movement emerged that aimed at severely restricting immigration, especially against foreign ethnicities considered nonwhite. By 1920 fully one-third of the U.S. population was either foreign-born or had at least one foreign-born parent. The Irish had not been fully considered white by Anglo-America until the second half of the nineteenth century. Southern and eastern European Catholics and Jews, who from the 1880s on constituted the major groups of European migration to the United States, were also categorically excluded from...