SlapGate: Remembering the many slaps before The Slap

From a mother's slap on the face of an errant child to the one that has now gone into Oscar history, the elaborate action in which flat palm-meets soft cheek has a rich history and etymology. It is often believed to be from the German Schlappe (defeat). Whether that’s what Will Smith had in mind when he bestowed it on Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscar Awards ceremony isn’t clear since it led to his own exit from the Academy.

Not that there is any ambiguity about the word itself. The sound says it all. Though the English slap is not half as onaemotopic as the thappad in Hindi or its variants in many Indian languages, few more evocative than the chaud in Bengali or the muscular chempa debba in Telugu which literally means a blow to the cheek. The Turks come close to giving the sentiment behind the word its due calling it tokat, while the Spaniards almost make it feel like a little dance with their la palmada. 

Whatever the term, its implications are more or less the same everywhere. The slap isn’t a physical rebuke. It stings more than it hurts, the injury being more to the receiver’s ego than to the body. In that sense, Will Smith chose his weapon carefully. A punch to Chris Rock’s face would have been a far more serious thing and probably invited a swift response. Rarely is the response to a slap a similar smack across the face. Indeed, there is almost something non violent about it with its biblical reference: “But I tell you not to resist an evildoer. On the contrary, whoever slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other to him as well.”

In movies of course the slap has been used in dozens of scenes in different contexts and with varying consequences. There is the sheer shock of the successive slaps with which Jack Nicholson extracts the bitter truth about the shocking relationship between the character played by Faye Dunaway and her father in the 1974 thriller Chinatown. Elsewhere, there is the Godfather slapping his godson Johnny Fontane around when he is whining about not getting a movie part, telling him all the while to man up. The movie incidentally celebrated 50 years of its making with an Oscar day tribute featuring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Francis Ford Cappola who thanked the writer Mario Puzo and producer Robert Evans for their support in making the film, but seemed to have forgotten to mention Marlon Brando. A bit of a slap in the face for the legendary actor who stuffed his mouth with kleenex for the screen tests of the movie.