He who gets slapped: how can clowning in film interrogate technoscientific culture and help enact the ideals of responsible innovation?

ABSTRACT

Enacting reflexivity in techno-scientific research systems is an ongoing challenge for responsible innovation (RI) researchers and practitioners. Drawing on one of the most successful films of Hollywood's silent years –Victor Seastrom's He Who Gets Slapped (1924) – this paper argues that the study of popular culture can make a vital contribution to enacting reflexivity by illuminating the messy emotions involved in changing established techno-scientific norms and by providing cultural resources to foster innovative ways of approaching the transformational goals of RI. Enhancing reflexivity in research systems requires cultural work to challenge established identities associated with being a scientist and to illustrate alternatives that might enable RI aspirations. Our reading of the eponymous clown-scientist and the film's key dramatic moment of traumatic loss highlight how the cultural forces of personal identity and identification can draw attention to and challenge institutional power, and serve as a new resource for RI researchers and practitioners.

KEYWORDS:

• Responsible innovation
• RRI implementation
• identity
• cultural studies
• reflexivity

Introduction

Why is it hard to enact the ideals of responsible innovation (RI)? The ‘difficulty and doability’ (Fisher 2019, 115) of implementing aspirations for reflexive approaches to innovation has preoccupied many in the JRI community. The enactment of RI precepts is ‘uneven, irregular and limited’, a recent paper observes, echoing a wider trend (Tabarés et al. 2022). Several studies highlight limited awareness of what responsible innovation means or what it entails, allowing researchers to accommodate RI principles in terms of what they already do rather than consider ways of transforming these practices (Åm 2019). Mandatory requirements to incorporate responsible innovation precepts – as until recently, was the case in the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research framework programme – can all too easily lead to box-ticking or ‘responsibility-wash[ing]’ (Randles, Tancoigne, and Joly 2022, 4).

Scholars conducting interview-based studies with scientists highlight structural and cultural reasons why reflexivity has been challenging to enact. Structural reasons include the power of commercial interests (Tabarés et al. 2022) and the incentives created by science funding systems, which can pose problems for how scientists perceive their own agency (Åm 2019). Scientists feel their room to manoeuvre is limited by existing institutional arrangements and resources, inhibiting their ability to question and reflect on embedded innovation pathways and orientations (Åm 2019). Implementing Horizon 2020's responsible research and innovation (RRI) framework was a challenge insofar as it was seen as ‘yet another’ demand imposed on already burdened and time-poor scientists.

Cultural reasons speak to a perceived tension between the demands of responsible innovation embodied by the precept of reflexive practice and the norms of scientific autonomy and excellence (Åm 2019; Tabarés et al. 2022). Carrier and Gartzlaff (2020) argue that even where scientists demonstrate goodwill towards RI/RRI agendas, some cultural discomfort remains for reasons that cannot be dismissed. Scientists contributing to JRI have also explored similar tensions. For example, Grinbaum (2020) reflects on the dilemma for scientists and engineers of having to live with and negotiate competing cultural expectations: efficiency and productivity on the one hand and the risk of coming to be judged for outcomes beyond their control (‘moral luck’) on the other. So how, then, is cultural change possible? Cultural norms are embedded and routinised in everyday practices – and consequently resist change. Frodeman (2019) is therefore sceptical about the possibility of implementing responsible innovation ideals, arguing that we are locked into a culture of endless innovation and ‘infinite impact’. Yet, the very fact that the challenges of implementing RI in general, and reflexivity in research and innovation systems in particular, are being opened up for discussion offers a moment of renewed hope for culturing responsible innovation.

In this paper, we explore the potential of studies of popular culture to contribute to this ongoing debate. Without wishing to dismiss the development of responsible innovation as a ‘rational’ or reason-centred discourse targeting the sub-optimality of innovation systems, we argue that the study of popular culture can speak to messy, often unvoiced, fears about change as well as to the power of cultural forms to foster new ways of approaching transformational goals.

Despite the foundational legacy of Frankenstein (1818) in encouraging reflection on science and responsibility (Guston 2018; Halpern et al. 2016), the analysis of popular culture features only rarely in the pages of JRI. To be sure, authors have referred to (pop) cultural artefacts – e.g. to films such as You Can’t Take It with You (1938; Frodeman 2019), stories such as ‘Doctor Doolittle’ (Guston 2018) and ‘The Lottery of Babylon’ (Reinhart and Schendzielorz 2020), and games such as ‘Want, Settle, Get’ (Guston 2015) – to illuminate the motivations, biases, politics and policies that influence technological innovation. Representations created by popular culture help shape images of science in the collective imagination and social attitudes, which in turn mould the design of particular technologies. For example, the notorious 1915 film, Birth of a Nation was instrumental in reinforcing racist beliefs, the traces of which are discernible in the biased algorithms of today (William 2020). The documentary Fixed: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement (2013) prompted more extensive analysis of popular culture to explore responsible innovation themes; in this case, on how technologies that aim to ‘fix’ disability may end up redefining what is considered ‘normal’ (de Saille 2014; Eggleson and Berry 2015). Overall, in keeping with the legacy of Frankenstein, the responsible innovation community has typically leaned on popular culture to explore the classic problem of technological overreach and pose questions about where the boundaries of technological ingenuity might lie. Important as these might be, it is unclear how focusing on ethical questions about the technological outcomes of scientific inquiry might connect with the messy emotions and realities of technoscientific culture and prospects for transforming them.

To reflect on these issues and explore intersections between RI and cultural studies, we excavate a famous silent film, He Who Gets Slapped (1924), for lessons and pointers on how meanings around science and responsibility are constructed and reinforced through cultural tropes. One of the most successful films of Hollywood’s silent years, Victor Seastrom’s (Swedish original: Sjöström) drama depicts a scientist, Paul Beaumont, who upon being betrayed by his sponsor and humiliated by a fictional Academy of the Sciences, becomes a nameless clown in a circus (referred to in his performances just as HE). While the film could be read simply as a tragedy set in motion by an episode of plagiarism and betrayal of other kinds, it deserves a reading more attentive to the layers of complexity that define the most ambitious cultural creations. The paper arises from conversations at the Australian National University between academics from different disciplines: responsible innovation, social studies of science and cultural studies. Members of this group came together with the aim of exploring common interests and in particular, the possibility of gaining a fresh perspective on familiar concerns in responsible innovation when looked at from the study of popular culture. While the story of Frankenstein was familiar to everybody, the first author opened up the lesser-studied He Who Gets Slapped as an object of analysis, results from which feature in this piece. We approach the film as a parable or exemplar for interrogating the challenges of enacting responsible innovation through reflexive technoscientific practice.

Interpretative framework: cultural narratives and meanings of science and responsible innovation

Our cinematic pop-cultural representations of scientists, science and innovation, whether in the twenty-first or twentieth century, did not arrive on the scene fully formed. They are embedded in and an expression of complex and multifaceted cultural contexts and transmedia (public) discourses. The 1924 film He Who Gets Slapped, for example, could thus be discussed in light of the development of (circus-related) popular science films or scientists-featuring film history more broadly (see Frayling 2006; Gaycken 2005; Jenkins 1992; Skal 1998). However, understanding this article as an exploratory piece at the interface of RI and cultural studies, we do not claim to disentangle the entire science and technology-related clowniverse in which He Who Gets Slapped might be discussed. Nor do we intend to provide categorical ‘truths’ about the functions of cultural artefacts and their cultural context for responsible innovation. Rather, we seek to raise questions about the role of pop culture for grasping, testing and expanding our notions of responsibility and reflexivity by exploring the possibility of gaining novel insights for RI from a specific cultural artefact that widely popular in its time.

We are thus interested in the narrative of He Who Gets Slapped as “a unique communication tool for portraying science in ways that intersect with human experience” (Kaplan and Dahlstrom 2017, 317), which points to the broader perception and potential of science as a cultural institution within society (Davies et al., 2019) and to cultural narratives about science that go beyond the aforementioned Frankenstein tradition. Cultural narratives are “plots that recur insistently within a culture” (Maza 1996, 1495), and the cultural narrative of alchemy (which includes the ubiquitous Frankenstein narrative) is by far the most popular. It has “continued to provide a potent source of myth-making for the critique of modern science” (Haynes 2007, 8; see Weingart 2006) with its “ability to evoke perennially convincing patterns of horror, mystery, and evil” (Haynes 2007, 29). As RI researchers seek to re-orient the terms of debate around innovation and around normative questions of the good (Hurlbut 2015), we need cultural narratives that offer more than visions of technological horror. We seek to excavate the case of He Who Gets Slapped for this purpose. To begin with, we clarify the role of the protagonist, Beaumont, as a figure of cutting-edge science. Science in film is considered a tool for drama, and not usually a platform for discussing complex knowledge. It predominantly serves as the content of visually interesting and dramatic scenes that have a logical explanation or contain ‘scientific sincerity’ (rather than scientific ‘accuracy’, see Kirby 2011, 12, 17). While entertainment media, which play an essential role in constructing science’s meaning, take more liberties in constructing images of reality, their frame of reference still remains more or less, social reality rather than science per se. However, in the medium of film, science narratives have their own persuasive truths. Although the potentially creative and speculative aspects of Beaumont’s scientific work are not revealed in the film, the audience is introduced to how Beaumont spent tedious years working alone on his dissertation on ‘The Origins of Mankind’, thus linking him to Darwin and, implicitly, to scientific authenticity. Although the Origin of Species was published in 1859, the subject of human evolution was still publicly contentious at the time of the film (the Scopes Trial happened a year later in 1925); so, the title of Beaumont’s dissertation also associates the author with scientific innovation.

Interestingly, some film databases (e.g. IMDb) refer to the central character of Seastrom’s film as an ‘inventor’. Perhaps this is a consequence of contemporary cultural tropes of scientist-as-inventor; however, this ‘inventor’ is most certainly not cast in the Victor Frankenstein mould. Beaumont’s invention is a scientific theory, not an artefact, let alone a human simulacrum. The film was adapted from an early twentieth century play by Leonid Andreyev, which was performed to acclaim in the US and Russia. Andreyev pioneered the theatre of the panpsyche where events unfolding on the stage act as a vehicle to explore the protagonist’s – or more broadly, a universal human’s – psychological struggle (White 2016). Seastrom’s film transformed the intellectual character at the centre of the play into a research scientist who has been working on new ideas about human origins. Film studies scholars provide glimpses of both Seastrom’s motivations and Andreyev’s philosophy, which we can build on to tease out the implications for a cultural understanding of the travails and possibilities of responsible innovation.

In his interpretation of Andreyev’s thought, Nathanson (1925) suggests that the film’s ideas are motivated by a deep concern about the limits of philosophical materialism in which only the realities described by modern science (investigating matter) are of consequence – anything else to do with the world of imagination or the meaning of life is mere speculation. From this standpoint of scientific reductionism, ‘human life is nothing but mockery, and our roles and functions are only those of clowns’ (Nathanson 1925, 13). Others have argued that the circus and clown acts which are central to both the play and the film represent a cultural form that allows performers to draw attention to stifling social norms and simultaneously destabilise them through exaggeration. Transporting these reflections to the twenty-first century, we might see the character, HE, as a figure drawing attention to the institutionalised absurdities of research system norms. Like Robert, Finn and Guston in their annotated Frankenstein collection (Shelley et al. 2017), we want to explore how Seastrom’s iconic cultural artefact could enhance our understanding of how these norms constrain the practice of responsible innovation and the cultural means by which they might be disturbed.

He who gets slapped – a tragic tale of (the lack of) research integrity?

Featuring Lon Chaney, one of the most famous actors in early cinema, the psychological thriller He Who Gets Slapped was a blockbuster of its time that spawned adaptations in various media (Florin 2013; White 2016). Appearing in 1924, He Who Gets Slapped is situated between ‘the whizz-bang films’ (Frayling 2006, 224) of early cinema creators (such as Georges Méliès), influential German Expressionist films (including The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919)) and the wave of mad scientists in Hollywood movies from the 1930s. Unlike many of these films, He Who Gets Slapped focuses on placing science in a social context, making it a fascinating cultural artefact to analyse in terms of responsible innovation frameworks. Directed by Victor Seastrom (who changed his Swedish moniker, Sjöström, during his time in the US, and who later became an actor, acclaimed for his starring role in Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film, Wild Strawberries), the film was the first production by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (MGM) from a decade in which the American film industry first actively courted talent from overseas (Lunde 2010, 48). It was a financial triumph of the time (Glancy 1992), with Seastrom being ‘widely heralded as one of the greatest directors in the world’ (Lunde 2010, 48). In one respect, He Who Gets Slapped is a dramatic story of tragedy that unfolds from an episode of scientific plagiarism, but we will suggest the film opens up a number of other cultural meanings relevant for our purposes.

The film is the story of Paul Beaumont (Chaney), a scientist who becomes a clown. Before his successful career in circus, he had been labouring alone on his dissertation for years when a patron-figure, Baron Regnard, became interested in Beaumont’s new theories and achievements in the anthropological and biological sciences. The Baron hears that Beaumont is ready to present his work before the Academy of the Sciences and ‘arranges’ the meeting. However, in connivance with Beaumont’s wife, Marie, the Baron steals Beaumont’s scientific papers from a safe and takes sole credit for them during the Academy meeting. Deeply shocked, Beaumont confronts the Baron in front of the academicians, in vain. The Baron calls him a starving student he hired as an assistant and, in the scene’s climax, slaps him in the face. All other scientists laugh at this humiliation and escort Beaumont from the room. Seeking comfort, Beaumont later goes to his wife, but she informs him of her affair with the Baron and calls him a clown. Five years later, Beaumont has abandoned science. Working as a clown called ‘HE who gets slapped’, he is the star attraction of a small circus near Paris. His act involves presenting scientific findings in front of the Academy of the Sciences – most members dressed as clowns – and features him getting slapped every evening by other clowns/Academy members. HE proclaims: ‘Honorable Gentlemen! Tonight I will prove the Earth is round’ and then: ‘Honorable Gentlemen! I beg your pardon – the Earth is flat!’ – for which HE is then constantly slapped and finally murdered, on stage every night (as part of the act). HE enjoys great public success until the shadows of his past reappear in the form of the Baron, ultimately leading to a romantic tragedy in the second part of the film.

Both the film and the play from which it was adapted have been interpreted as symbolic treatments of perennial questions to do with the meaning of life, human emotions and social norms. Lunde (2010) argues that Seastrom’s film can be read as a story of the auteur’s own experience of racial assimilation and the construction of whiteness in the US at a time of mass immigration of Europeans. From the standpoint of responsible innovation, however, the Baron’s theft of Beaumont’s work stands out as a central motif, suggesting a tale of scientific integrity or its lack, albeit dramatised as personal trauma.

Research integrity is a core part of the European Commission’s six-key interpretation of responsible innovation – or ‘responsible research and innovation’ (RRI). The Commission’s conceptualisation has, however, been critiqued for sidestepping larger questions about the direction of technological innovation in favour of already established commitments to root out fraud and so on (e.g. Owen, von Schomberg, and Macnaghten 2021). Scientific integrity is self-evidently important, but it does not capture what responsible innovation is meant to be about, i.e. the desire to open up such questions of reflexive practice as: what is technological innovation for? For what sort of future? How do research agendas implicitly favour certain futures, effectively foreclosing other possible ways of organising how we live? How can publics inform and possibly reshape these futures? Defining responsibility in terms of issues internal to science (e.g. research integrity) risks taming the potential of responsible innovation frameworks to transform innovation systems. RI becomes easier to implement, but only in terms of a narrow understanding of individual responsibility to do the right thing (thou shall not steal another’s intellectual property).

Seen from the perspective of popular culture, however, Seastrom’s film offers a salutary reminder of how matters internal to science may be entangled in more complex ways with prospects for systemic change. The Baron’s behaviour exemplifies unethical scientific practice, but in a way that speaks to concerns about institutional power as set out by RI implementation scholars. More broadly, the film’s central character, Paul Beaumont/HE, is a scientist-turned-clown, a complex figure whose meanings we aim to unpack. We investigate the ways in which HE’s science becomes trauma. Demonstrated through humour and comic performance, we explore the power of the cultural form to disturb and open up established structures of science.

Against this background, what makes a responsible scientist in the first place? The responsible scientist called into being in the field of RI is someone who is able to stand up for a way of doing science that integrates – rather than accommodates or expunges – matters of society and anticipatory ethics into the heart of science (e.g. Balmer et al. 2016). And yet, implementing such visions of integration has not been simple as the many empirical studies of RI initiatives attest and as we explore in relation to themes from the film. In what follows, we first examine Beaumont’s struggle as symbolising the cultural force of personal identity and identification with particular ways and norms of being a scientist, which in turn make it hard to implement RI ideals. Second, we trace Beaumont’s humiliation in the annals of the Academy of the Sciences to the power of the institution to disempower those who do not (or do not appear to) conform. Finally, this institutional context helps us situate the value of cultural studies in discerning the dual nature of transformative efforts. Of HE’s fate – as a clown who is humiliated every day on stage – we can ask if Beaumont has the last laugh.

Being a scientist: losing and reconstructing identity

Responsible innovation scholars have traced the limited impact of RRI initiatives in part to cultural reasons, notably, embedded norms about what it means to do good science. Put another way, there are few prominent representations of scientist-innovator identities exemplifying the normative ideals of responsible innovation as imagined by RI scholars. Implementing responsible innovation therefore requires cultural work, not least to diversify the identity of science – and scientists – in ways that might signify RI tropes. In this section, we explore the importance of cultural identity for science, and by extension, responsible innovation, by analysing the traumatic loss – and subsequent recreation – of identity dramatised in Seastrom’s film. Upon being slapped by the Baron in front of the Academicians, Paul Beaumont, the film’s protagonist, is cast out of the community of science that had hitherto defined him. His trauma of non-belonging is not due to the content of his scientific work – indeed, his presumed benefactor considers the work worthy enough to steal. Nonetheless, Beaumont’s effort to reclaim authorship signals a stepping out-of-line in relation to scientific authority, for which he suffers public humiliation. He ends up with a radically new identity, that of a nameless clown, HE.

At the time He Who Gets Slapped emerged, the line between ‘civilised’-human and ‘barbaric’-nonhuman animal identity was a topic of political, social and cultural interest. The circus was a major cultural institution and very popular form of public entertainment at that time (Jürgens 2020). Technical contrivers, stage engineers and performers have contributed to negotiations about the future of their art via technological innovations, continuously (re)inventing and improving props and performance equipment. The intersections between scientific knowledge and creative imagination have also been explored in circus sideshows. Here, so-called professors provided an aura of scientific validity to exhibition and acts of so-called freak performers, often linking them to discourses on evolution (e.g. Goodall 2020). Within the circus arena itself, the genre of slapstick comedy muddies this boundary due to its association with the physical body as opposed to the mind. The title of his dissertation, ‘The Origins of Mankind’, suggests that Beaumont was working on this very question even as his own identity and place at the border of mind and body came to be shattered. Upon his humiliation at the Academy, Beaumont moves from the realm of cognitively-oriented ‘elitist’ culture (i.e. scientific conferences) to the realm of physically-oriented popular entertainment (i.e. slapstick comedy, clowning).

Beaumont’s crossing of the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is reminiscent of the protagonist of A Report to an Academy, a famous 1917 short story by novelist Franz Kafka, a major figure of twentieth century literature who, like Andreyev, was fascinated by popular performance. In many of his works, Kafka explored circus performers as nihilistic allegories of the modern artist (Jürgens 2016; Theisen 2002). This analogy with Kafka’s story is helpful for teasing out a fundamental ambiguity in Beaumont’s fall from scientific grace; the clown signifies a socially permissible mode of stripping away the veneer of self-importance in how humans, including scientists, mark themselves.

A Report to an Academy presents a personal evolution narrative in which a captive ape (Red Peter) adapts into human-ness. The story, however, does not presume that human existence is superior to animal existence; it is not described in terms of progress – as expected at that time – but in many ways as a behavioural regression (see Norris 2010, 62). What Kafka’s protagonist actually discusses (and represents) by telling his life’s story to an undefined Academy (that is, how he was captured in Africa, forced to perform on popular stages and then decided to become ‘human’) is the impossibility of developing and establishing a meaningful cultural order of life outside of humanity.

In both stories, the Academy stands for institutional processes (in Kafka’s story: of the natural; in Seastrom’s film: scientific authority) that could also be exploitative, degrading and victimising. The individuals in both stories perform an ethnography of their own culture on stage. Whereas Kafka’s captured-and-enculturated Red Peter tells his audience that he quickly learnt that adopting human behaviours, traits and ways of thinking allowed him freedom from captivity, recently-humiliated Beaumont has to revert to using physical comedy in his own search for freedom. To that end, he went from being the scientist-Beaumont to the clown-HE – an identity-lacking pronoun-named individual who uses his body, rather than his mind, to connect to and communicate with his audience. The audiences’ laughter at Beaumont reflects the switch from cognitive appreciation to savage embarrassment, mediated through a humiliating act, which can be considered as ‘literally inhumane: in humiliating someone, we treat him as a non-human – a beast perhaps … ’ (Berkovski 2016, 79). The scientific institution became an enabler of comic violence for Beaumont, leading to disintegration of his identity as a scientist and to his distancing from the scientific community.

In contrast, Red Peter argues that he did not learn to imitate humans because it was intrinsically rewarding, but because it provided him ‘a way out’ of the situation he found himself in – a form of identity-preservation. Adopting human culture was simply opting for a different sort of confinement. Similarly, Beaumont did not choose to be discredited when he walked onto the Academy’s stage – but upon exiting the stage, he found a ‘way out’ of the humiliation by owning it. He may not enjoy being slapped, but knowingly and willingly stepping onto a stage to entertain via clowning provided HE with an identity – a sort of confinement – he could accept. Rather than awkwardly crossing the elite-non-elite boundary, he firmly planted himself on the side of the non-elite by being a clown.

From an RI perspective, this underlines why a major transition in one’s social role within/from science can be traumatic – and how those who are cast out of the community must find a way to reconstitute their identity. Beaumont appears to undergo a major transformation in this regard, shedding his scientific garb to perform in a setting as far removed as possible from the elite domain of science. This transition is a moment for opening up institutional norms of science, or at least, those that preserve existing hierarchies.

The power of the academy: institutional irresponsibility as a moment for reflexivity

Cinematic representations of science’s procedures and processes produce and present ‘an image of science’ that may not always have much in common with everyday science (Kirby 2011, 117). He Who Gets Slapped is something of a departure from this norm in that the portrayal of the Baron resonates with current concerns around integrity in research, including plagiarism, misconduct (Carrier and Gartzlaff 2020; Randles, Tancoigne, and Joly 2022) and intellectual theft. Scholars have tried to ‘rescue’ the normative potential of responsible innovation from this all-too-easy association with internal scientific integrity (see Ashworth et al. 2019). However, the film also offers a subtler set of lessons for linking responsibility-as-integrity with the goal of stimulating greater reflexivity about implicit innovation commitments embedded in everyday research practices.

In the film, academic misconduct is not merely about an incident of fraud or theft, but its more far-reaching cultural impact. The Academy represent a socially constructed and vetted cultural form for producing and acknowledging science. Academicians can be viewed as an ‘incarnation of tradition’ (unfolding in roles that new people can embody as time passes, spanning generations), and their cultural identity as a collective identity ‘with a shared and recognisable physiognomy’ (Daston and Sibum 2003, 4). Any individual member of the Academy is celebrated not just on the basis of their individual scientific or public achievements, but on recognition of these by the esteemed Academy. Being denied the chance to defend his claim to scientific discovery in front of the Academy’s gatekeepers, Beaumont loses the struggle to establish himself as a science persona in a broader cultural sense (Källstrand 2020, 2).

This risk of cultural dislocation poses a genuine challenge to the RI vision of cultivating reflexivity within the research process. The ability to be reflexive may be difficult in an environment of power differentials between senior scientists and trainees (Faulkes 2018), a hegemony that tends to be normalised as part of the apprenticeship process (Sikes 2009). Women, persons of colour, gender-diverse individuals and junior faculty may find it particularly difficult to negotiate this hierarchy (Chawla 2018). This is perfectly illustrated by Beaumont’s inability to contest his lack of acknowledgement by the Academy, given the Baron’s influence and wealth. The fact that the Baron was the one who organised the presentation of Beaumont’s research findings to the Academy demonstrates the extent of the power asymmetry between him and Beaumont, with HE being introduced on stage as someone who ‘had struggled alone, in poverty’. Historical examples of institutional denial – e.g. Rosalind Franklin was not formally recognised for her role in discovering DNA and Luc Montagnier’s HIV research was not initially credited to him – signal the ever-present risk of breakdown of trust in the scientific community (Southwick 2012) with knock-on implications for implementing RI. One of the postdoc respondents in a Nature survey highlighted, ‘I’m paid less than the average salary of a clown in the US (which is US$59,000 annually). It’s not my adviser’s fault; it’s just a toxic tradition of academia to horrifically underpay highly trained, highly skilled and well-educated people.’ (Woolston 2020). Stimulating reflection on embedded innovation pathways and prospects for transforming them in such an institutional environment is bound to be challenging.

But again, this is where a cultural sensibility is helpful for discerning creative openings in the face of apparently solid social structures. HE symbolises an outcast as well as a figure of redemption who is cast in the role of revealing truths about the world, about the unknown – and is applauded by the public for his performance. Traumatic failure becomes the clown’s raison d’être, with the circus performance a pathway for triumphing over a hidebound institution.

Who has the last laugh? Staging a hybrid identity for science through humour

‘Humor is tragedy plus time.’ – Mark Twain

(cited in McGraw et al. 2012, 1215)

In Kafka’s A Report to an Academy (see above), Red Peter is neither man nor ape, but a hybrid being who calls attention to the vanities and cruelties of human culture. Similarly, we might see HE as calling attention to similar issues in scientific-institutional culture through his new persona, the scientist-clown in the circus ring. Acknowledging his rejection by the Academy, he uses humour to mock the scientific establishment as a form of ‘political, strategic, opposition that transgresses the realm of science’ (Wazeck 2013, 168). HE becomes a proponent of marginalised knowledge arising from authorship theft, who seeks recognition and affirmation from the public and from other performers/clowns in the circus.

Scientists condense the heterogeneity of scientific data into a single coherent public narrative (see Kirby 2011, 223). HE’s performance as the scientist among the clowns consists of his inability to fulfil this cultural expectation of scientific coherence, but in a way that exploits the risibility of this condition. His act is an act of not-knowing-for-sure. His struggle for words (‘the Earth is round’ – ‘the Earth is flat!’ – ‘the Earth is hard’)¹ could well be read as a staging of HE not knowing what the words mean, thus suggesting he is not an authority who is capable of producing knowledge (cf. Kirby 2011, 76). This is portrayed by him starting off in stilts, getting knocked off them, having his statements regarding the earth’s nature ridiculed, and continuously getting slapped by other clowns while being the centre of the audience’s laughter. But equally, the slaps represent the lack of seriousness and integrity in the very scientific institution he was once part of. By embodying a clown and communicating this symbolism to the audience, HE stages his opposition to the socio-political structure of the scientific institution he now experiences as oppressive.

Both as a scientist and as a circus artist, HE is attempting to reveal truths about the world, about the unknown. Since HE cannot get his clown audience in the arena – which is part of his act and resemble (and cinematographically crossfade with) the academicians – nor the circus audience to accept his scientific ideas, he is constantly slapped, kicked and killed every night as part of his performance. However, this dramatic ‘failure’ as a clown-scientist in the circus arena earns him public recognition in ways his science never did – by capitalising on his non-scientific clown appeal. In performing this act regularly, HE takes control of the image that he projects to the world, in addition to his own identity. By rerouting his science trauma toward a pleasurable affect, perhaps we might see HE as ‘triumphing’ over the traumas of the external (academic) world in similar ways to how some contemporary comedians find the process of turning unpleasant experience and personal trauma into comedy therapeutic (see Double 2017, 154, 144). His act may be powerful because it symbolises that wounding can simultaneously be healing (and vice versa); that, as Morris puts it, ‘[c]omedy must implicitly include pain in order somehow to overcome it’ (Gilbert 2014, 155).

In sum, the evocative power of HE’s clown-scientist performance – with its ‘experiential’ tragic mode – lies in its ambiguity or dual nature. This hybrid figure evokes a panoply of contradictory emotions, a space that responsible innovation may need to learn to navigate in conjunction with a more traditional focus on reasoned discourse.

Conclusion

Calls for reflexivity and responsible innovation in science are typically framed around cultivating the capacity to pause and anticipate the repercussions not just of scientific products, but also of the process of doing and acknowledging science. Yet, this capacity to pause is limited in fast-paced, competitive research and in an innovation culture that is primarily focused on ‘breakthroughs’ and ‘world-firsts’ (Brown 2000; Nerlich 2009). We have explored how a famous silent-era film/circus can offer an avenue for a ‘moving’ pause that enables moments of reflection and critique within the timespan of performance.

Our close reading of He Who Gets Slapped highlights that identification with culturally embedded perceptions of being a scientist complicates the implementation of reflexivity in technoscientific research systems, not least because of the ways in which institutions can disempower those who do not abide by their rules or norms. However, institutional power is not just one-sided; the figure of the clown-scientist simultaneously signifies a wounded object of contempt and a pathway of healing through critique and subversion of this system.

In conclusion, in arguing for He Who Gets Slapped as a significant cultural text for addressing RI concerns, we summarise key lessons from the tale and broader implications for responsible innovation. First, Beaumont’s struggle underlines the cultural difficulties of implementing RI highlighted by empirical research (e.g. Åm 2019; Tabarés et al. 2022). But these are deeper than previously recognised, given the cultural force of personal identity and identification with particular ways of being a scientist. This is symbolised in Beaumont’s trauma at being cast out by the institution to which he was meant to belong, thus losing his dream of inhabiting a scientific persona. Grinbaum (2020) provides a story of OpenAI designers who decided to hold back releasing their natural language processing system because they were concerned it was susceptible to large-scale abuse; in the end, they were widely ridiculed when a competing team replicated and publicised their own work. Other stories have similarly emerged in popular media about AI researchers being fired for failing to align with corporate interests (e.g. Hao 2020), offering a salutary reminder of why the trauma of not-belonging remains ever present for the modern scientist. From an RI implementation lens, a key question for future work is how to tease out a cultural identity (or identities) for the reflexive scientist-innovator figure who might embody some of the normative ideals set out in the field. If current scientific identities appear to militate against the implementation of RI as RRI scholars have suggested, what then would a new identity look like? What cultural meanings would they inhabit and signify? Much remains to be done to flesh out these issues.

Second, Beaumont’s humiliation in the annals of the Academy of the Sciences underlines the power of the institution to be the judge of new theories and to disempower those who do not conform. Seen from the lens of RI, Beaumont stands for a heroic, even subversive, version of the Responsible Scientist while the Baron who steals Beaumont’s ideas perhaps defanged and tamed them to be acceptable to the institution. The ‘big words’ of RRI policy may be countervailed by researchers on the ground – as Bos et al. (2014) find in their study of a Dutch RRI initiative – but the relationship may well work in the other direction with scientists trying to stand up to embedded innovation commitments and potentially articulating alternative models of good science, only to be quashed by institutional pressures.

Third, although institutional hierarchies constrain the capacity for reflexivity in large-scale systems, cultural forms may help us work with ambiguity and develop new ways of imagining transformation. Of HE’s fate – as a clown who is humiliated every day on stage – we can ask if Beaumont has the last laugh.

Seastrom’s landmark fusion of science, comic performance and trauma provides an opportunity to reflect on how science is framed, structured and perceived by different audiences. Technoscientific innovations are not only dependent on the capacities of individual scientists, but they are also influenced and at times limited, by larger institutions and funding bodies. Ridiculing himself as a clown in the liminal space between circus and social performance, displaying his once-upon-a-time scientific knowledge as ridiculous (if not an aggression against scientific knowledge) and thus performing comedic violence on himself, HE mocks the unreflected or naïve assent to the politics of scientific research and knowledge production. The traumascape of the circus in He Who Gets Slapped – where science embodies a theatre of cruelty – underlines that humour and laughter do not necessarily go hand in hand and that ‘there are many forms of laughter that are not responses to humor’ (Kuipers 2006, 8). While, in general, laughter may strengthen a group’s cohesion (Martin 2007, 10), laughing within the film is not a sign of solidarity and togetherness or happiness. Quite the opposite, it signals and provokes alienation – it is not related to humour (see Jürgens et al. 2021). The academicians’ collective laughter does not only challenge the seriousness of Beaumont’s claims to be a scientist, but it also represents the dialectical inversion of the challenge: it simultaneously reinforces the idea of science as a potential oppressor and source of trauma.

Comedy is, undeniably, intertwined with humanity. Around the time that He Who Gets Slapped was released, laughter was seen as critical to human evolution (‘born of the exigencies of evolving humanity’), in that ‘[i]t has eased – it is easing – the transition from the freedom and naturalness of animal and savage life to freedom from the animal and savage’ (Bliss 1915, 242, 246). In this view, humour allows us to transcend our animality; it is the origin of ‘mankind’. However, comic violence – in the form of humiliation – threatens Beaumont’s social and scientific standing among his peers; it makes his own origin a source of shame. Beaumont’s innovative research and subsequent conversion into HE are tied to identity; first through the loss of his scientific identity (humiliation threatens his scientific social standing) and then, through the gain of his comedic identity (humour allowing a distancing from his ‘savage’ self) – an exchange of one cultural confinement (scientific authority) for another (clowning). Although Beaumont is reborn within the film, his rebirth is immediately situated as a devolution – culture has made him find his own identity and confinement as a brilliant mind imprisoned in a clown’s body. The representation of the Academy highlights the dual nature of science by becoming a source of comic violence.

In the end, the focus of reflection must not just be on HE-who-got-slapped, but equally on They-who-slap. In what ways can the scientific institution create a socio-political milieu that is oppressive, violent and traumatic? Today, scientific institutions have a range of mechanisms for regulating the conduct of scientists and promoting academic integrity; however, the lesson we draw from this silent-era film is that institutional mechanisms cannot be a substitute for the deeper reflection on implicit cultural commitments that become embedded in scientific practice over time. Even where the problem of theft and misconduct may have been ‘solved’, the moment to pause and reflect on the futures that science is helping create still remains to be seised. Future research can also examine more closely the role of clowning, humour, laughter and play in science and innovation (in the past, e.g. since Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, but also in relation to contemporary phenomena such as the animated science and innovation-focused series Rick & Morty). If He Who Gets Slapped provides us with a genuinely ambiguous narrative around science and humour, what can we learn from it about the cultural narratives of science? Given that ‘cinematic images carry a cultural currency that both reflects and influences public attitudes toward the scientific enterprise’ (Kirby 2011, 117), pop cultural representations of science that exist between laughter and trauma can ignite new cross-disciplinary conversations about the complexities of the development of professional identity, responsibility, scientific systems and underlying power asymmetries that can lead to disempowerment of scientists and their capacities for reflexive practice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Tara Roberson was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems (EQUS, CE170100009) and John Noel Viaña is funded by the ANU-CSIRO (Australian National University – Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) Responsible Innovation collaboration.

Notes on contributors

Anna-Sophie Jürgens

Anna-Sophie Jürgens is a Lecturer in Popular Entertainment Studies at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science (CPAS) at the Australian National University. Her research explores the history of comic mad scientists, Joker Science, science and humour, comic performance and technology, and the cultural meanings of science.

Sujatha Raman

Sujatha Raman is Director of Research and UNESCO Chair-holder in Science Communication for the Public Good at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at the Australian National University (ANU). She is ANU lead for the CSIRO-ANU Responsible Innovation Collaboration which includes projects on precision health and synthetic biology. Her research explores the interface between science, innovation and democratic goals in different settings.

Rebecca Hendershott

Rebecca Hendershott started with a ‘hard’ science background (animal studies, ecology and evolution, biological anthropology), but has since expanded into questions about how science is portrayed, discussed and used within popular culture. Her interest is on the human culture-nonhuman nature interface, which she takes into secondary science and humanities classrooms.

Tara Roberson

Tara Roberson is a postdoctoral researcher at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems and the University of Queensland. A science communicator, she works with quantum physicists to understand the implications of emerging quantum technologies. Her research focuses on a range of areas, including public communication of science and technology, queering science communication and responsible development and use of innovation. Tara also works in industry, delivering activities focused on ethics, law, and assurance for robotics, autonomous systems and artificial intelligence.

John Noel Viaña

John Noel Viaña is a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at the Australian National University and a visiting scientist at the Responsible Innovation Future Science Platform of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. His research explores equity and diversity issues in precision health innovation and public health promotion, particularly the inclusion of underrepresented groups in research and policy development.

Joan Leach

Joan Leach is Director of the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science (CPAS) at the Australian National University (ANU). She leads CPAS' contribution to two major interdisciplinary collaborations on responsible innovation: the Australian Research Council (ARC) Training Centre for Future Crops Development and the Enabling Openness in Stem Cell Research (EOAR) project funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).

Notes

1 The visual superimposition of the globe motif and the circus ring is a key cinematographic technique, metaphor and visual effect in this film (see Christen 2011), in the context of which this quote should be read (rather than in the context of contemporary flat earth notions). Before appearing in the round of the circus ring as a clown, the scientist turns and twists a globe, which then transforms into a spinning circus arena.