"Could she be gaslighting you?"
"What's gaslighting?" The term 'Gaslighting' gets thrown
around a lot these days. "Now, don't try to
gaslight me, Hicks." But where did it come from, and how did it become such
a buzzword of our times? "Gaslighter, denier" Gaslighting is a form
of emotional abuse where someone tries
to control you by convincing you to doubt
your experience of reality, or even your sanity. "A form of psychological abuse
in which false information is presented with the intention
of disorienting a victim." Its popularity may seem recent,
but the actual term 'gaslighting' dates all the way back to 1938, and a play by Patrick Hamilton
called 'Gas Light,' which was made into two movies
in the early 1940s (the second one starring
Ingrid Bergman). "Are you trying to
tell me I'm insane?" "That's what I'm trying not
to tell myself." "But that's what you
think isn't it, that's what you've been hinting
and suggesting for months now." In the story, a woman becomes
wracked with anxiety when her husband mysteriously
leaves every night, his departure always marked by the gaslights
in their Victorian home dimming. "The footsteps"
"What footsteps?" "And the gaslight
going up and down." "That's what made me sure
my mind is going, lying in my room
watching the gaslight, listening for someone
in a place no-one can go." Her husband tells her
the dimming lights are all in her head, causing her to doubt
her perception of reality, "I swear by almighty God that I neither took your watch
nor hid away the brooch." "Then you are mad!" until she worries
she's going insane. "I dream things when I'm awake.
I'm going out of my mind Elizabeth." The idea's roots in an intimate,
domestic setting make it a frequent reference
in modern relationship conflicts. "What about if you feel
you're being gaslit? Well I suppose what that
would mean is you're in a relationship
with someone and they're really
making you unsettled, and really making you unhappy." But another part of
its recent explosion in the public consciousness
has been its use as a method of
political control. "He is making us doubt
whether anything is true and it kinda robs us
of a foundation of truth, which is the only way
he can be held accountable." Here's our Take on how
the gaslighting trope has always been lurking
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for the whole year. Gaslight followed in
a longer tradition of equating femininity
with madness. As far back as
the Victorian age, the concept of hysteria was thought
to be a madness specific to women. The word itself originates
from the Greek word hystera, meaning 'uterus'. "Hysteria seems to cover everything
from insomnia to toothache." "It is not my--" "It's nothing more than a catch all
for dissatisfied women, women forced to spend their lives
on domestic chores." The mad, emotionally excessive,
and unstable women appeared in literature, too,
in characters like Jane Eyre's Bertha, the original
"madwoman in the attic," or Great Expectations' reclusive
jilted bride, Miss Havisham. "You're not afraid
of a woman who's never seen the sun
since you were born." "No ma'am." "Then come closer." Meanwhile, more sympathetic works like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's
The Yellow Wallpaper and Henrik Ibsen's A Doll House explored how simply being a wife
in an oppressively sexist society could threaten a woman's
selfhood and her sanity. "For eight whole years, you,
my pride and joy, a liar, a hypocrite. Is this the way you will reward me
for love and trust?" "Yes, like this" In Gaslight, what's striking is
the incremental way in which the husband gets his wife
to question her own mind. One minute, he's angry, and the next,
he's fawning and romantic, thus cultivating an atmosphere
of uncertainty and confusion. "Don't cry,
you'll spoil your looks, and I wanted you to look
very beautiful tonight." Equally central are how intimate
the husband's tactics are. "I wouldn't presume
to criticize your taste, but your hair, is it quite right?
Can I hold that?" This establishes gaslighting as something that often takes place
away from prying eyes, literally creating two worlds- the minds of two people -
that are in opposition to each other. And what's so
devastatingly effective about this private
form of mental assault is there's no third party to help
the victim confirm their own reality. The way Hollywood continued to feature
this trope post-Gaslight affirmed gaslighting as
a particularly intimate form of abuse. In 1964's Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte,
Olivia De Havilland's Miriam conspires to drive her cousin Charlotte
out of their house so she can take her place
as the heir to their family fortune. "Why wouldn't I tell him
that his pure, darling little girl was having a dirty little affair
with a married man?" Once again the home becomes a space
for psychological manipulation, as Miriam stokes Charlotte's anxieties
over the death of her lover, as well as the fact Charlotte
was implicated in his murder. Meanwhile, Charlotte's own theories- which happen to be correct-
are instantly written off. "You know, It wouldn't surprise me to find out that Jewel Mayhew
was behind all this." "Charlotte that is ridiculous." The 1953 film Dangerous Crossing takes gaslighting
out of the domestic sphere, but keeps it in the similarly
claustrophobic environment of an ocean liner. After newlywed Ruth's husband mysteriously goes missing
on their honeymoon, she's convinced by the ship's crew
that her marriage is non-existent, and that she's mentally unwell. "Mrs John Bowman."
"I'm afraid we have no such listing." "Oh but you have you must have."
"Here's the passenger list Mrs Bowman." In both of these cases,
there is a financial motive, just as in Gaslight,
the husband's behavior is arguably a reaction
to being emasculated by the fact that his wife's money
paid for their home. The women in all three stories
hold a great deal of wealth, and by extension, independence; the gaslighting trope is all
about trying to curtail that. "If you see anyone
it will be a doctor." "No, not a doctor Paul,
I- I'm well." "What are you doing?
You broke up with me." "That's crazy, why would I
break up with you? You're so hot." As we become more
aware of gaslighting, we notice it in more places- even in beloved stories
about characters who weren't intended
to be villainous. "Why are you pushing this?
What's in it for you?" "S-So now I need to have a motive
to want to be with you?" "You tell me."
"You need therapy, you know that?" Birth.Movies.Death.
calls Overboard - a film about a man
kidnapping a woman and convincing her she's
the mother of his four kids - "the most heartwarming rom-com
about gaslighting ever made". "I truly from the depths of my soul
do not remember you, don't you think there'd be
some spark of recognition?" "We don't know."
"Maybe you'll spark to this!" In How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Andie's humorous attempts to drive
Ben away for her magazine article might now strike us as unsettling, as she first establishes
a genuine personality with him and then gradually undermines that
by putting on a fake persona. "I used Photoshop at work today
to composite our faces together to see what our kids
would look like." And even when there's
no conscious, evil intent or outright abuse going on, it can be common to feel
like a romantic partner is denying vour reality. "She goes on for five pages
about how I was unfaithful to her." "We were on a break!" But in its true, extreme form,
gaslighting is violent. Because its subtlety makes it
hard to identify, depictions of gaslighting
in fiction can help educate the public
about domestic abuse. Two of the longest-running
British soap operas- Coronation Street and
BBC Radio 4 drama The Archers- both recently incorporated gaslighting
into their storylines, prompting fans to raise money for
domestic abuse hotlines and charities. "We were supposed to be
going on an early morning walk only you were spark-o." "Walk?" "Yeah we talked about it
last night for ages, about getting out of here,
spending some time together." In the 2016 thriller
The Girl on the Train, spoiler alert, Rachel's ex-husband Tom exploits
that she's plagued by alcoholism and blackouts
and can't trust her own memory. "Your wife hit me on Friday night...
yes she did, yes you did! And then she-and then
she got in your car." "No, she said you yelled
at her that night." "No that is..." The film makes an explicit link between Tom's psychological
and physical abuse, through the reveal that he's been
hitting Rachel during her blackouts. "I'm sorry Tom."
"Stop f-[BLEEP] saying that!" "Can you stand?" In Jessica Jones,
Jessica's ex Kilgrave- the supervillain version
of a gaslighter- deploys all the classic tricks
in the gaslighter's handbook, like painting himself as the victim
and twisting facts to his advantage. "You're mad about
the junkie aren't you? That is completely unfair, I didn't make him do anything
he didn't want to do." But he also has the superpower
of controlling people's minds, exaggerating the gaslighter's skill
for both manipulating their victims and presenting as charming
and helpful to others. "The beauty of what he does
is no-one knows how he does it. It can't be explained
so it can't be believed." Even in the more political thrillers
that use the trope, the intimacy of gaslighting's
abuse remains. In Homeland, Carrie Mathison's
bipolar disorder makes her a target for gaslighting
from enemy operatives, who take advantage of her
already vulnerable mental state with tactics like
swapping out her medication for a hallucinogen
stronger than LSD. "Six, eight, ten…" Carrie is literally trying to
protect not just her country, but also her own consciousness
from nefarious forces. "I was there. I saw you.
You were dead." "Your mind's playing tricks on you,
you've had a rough night--" "A rough night?
Are you f-[BLEEP] kidding me?" Similarly, Westworld makes
the themes of gaslighting explicit through the science fiction premise of androids who routinely
have their memories wiped. As artificially created hosts,
Dolores and Maeve strive for self-determination and freedom
from their human overlords. This manifests as
their developing consciousness fighting against being reset. Preceding both of these, The Matrix gives us a whole world
that's being gaslit into believing a simulation is real life. "This is the world that you know. The world as it was
at the end of the 20th century. It exists now only as part of
a neural-interactive simulation... that we call the Matrix." And the Agents, with their
brainwashing techniques, demonstrate how effectively
gaslighting can be used by government forces
in order to control a population. In these high-concept examples, the perpetrators are incorporating
overt weaponry into their gaslighting. Yet there is still an invisibility
to their tactics, as their tools of oppression
are created from things that we typically trust in. "You should be proud of
these emotions you're feeling." "Proud?" "Yes, after all you yourself
are the author of so many of them." It's in this atmosphere of uncertainty
that gaslighting thrives. According to Google trends,
search activity for the term rose sharply around the time
of Donald Trump's 2017 inauguration, when many commentators described
his assertions about the crowd size as gaslighting. "The field was, it looked
like a million, a million and a half people, they showed a field where
there were practically nobody standing there." and its popularity has continued
to shoot up since then. "We aren't the ones that called
the alarm being raised about this pandemic as fake news." Mike Mariani argues that Trump's continuing insistence
on narratives that have proven false takes after the tactics
of Russian politician and adviser to Vladimir Putin,
Vladislaw Surkow, who deliberately bombarded the press
with contradictory information as a way to maintain
a state of confusion and chaos. "His aim is to undermine
people's perception of the world, so they never know
what is really happening." Meanwhile, as the #MeToo movement
went viral in 2017, it came with an abundance of stories
of emotional gaslighting, and a re-examination
of the tactics some men have long used
to control women. "My life, I lived in
complete panic and fear whenever I was at home with him." And as Black Lives Matter
took center stage in 2020, people increasingly
began to tear down the false narrative that we're
living in a "post-racial society." Increasingly, stories today look
at how institutions gaslight vulnerable members of our society. In Netflix's Unbelievable,
gaslighting is seen as a symptom of rape culture. Kaitlyn Dever's Marie Adler
is a victim of rape who is repeatedly gaslit
by the police, to the point where
she begins to doubt whether it ever happened to her
in the first place. "And if your answer
turns out to be a lie, I have no choice
but to arrest you." Unbelievable illustrates how easy
it can be to successfully gaslight someone if you are
in a position of power over them. "Nope, totally made up. Says she didn't think it would
turn into such a big thing." It is only when Marie
gains new allies with power - Detectives Grace Rasmussen
and Karen Duvall - that she is able to
reconstruct her memory and challenge her gaslighters. Todd Haynes' Dark Waters
similarly shows how large, ostensibly trustworthy institutions
can use their reputation to get away with gaslighting
an entire community. "Maybe it's human error. They're dumping something
they don't know is toxic." "Kim, it's Dupont,
they know more than the EPA does." Just as gaslighting characters,
like Kilgrave, have their public face
and their private face, the DuPont Chemical Company
gets away with this behavior in part because they are seen as
honorable by the majority in the town, who can't believe
such an important employer might be doing something bad. In the Oscar-winning Spotlight, the Catholic Church
uses similar tactics to obfuscate and hush up accusations
of pedophilia and sexual assault. "Are you telling me that the Catholic
church removed legal documents from that courthouse." "Look, I'm not crazy,
I'm not paranoid." And Steve McQueen's Small Axe
sheds light on how gaslighting by police and
courts has long played a role in institutional racism. "I suggest that substantial
and important part of your evidence are deliberate lies designed to have my freedom
taken away from me!" Another reason gaslighting
may be a more recognizable trope in the 21st century is how it intersects with this era's
chosen form of communication: social media. The images we see and
cultivate on social media very rarely match
the full picture in reality. Tim Stimpson, a writer who worked on
the gaslighting arc in The Archers, says "We put so much of ourselves
on Facebook or Twitter, and it's all the way
we want ourselves to be seen." "I care for me.
Care of self, self care." "Back in the room, sorry." "So yes, you will have
to monitor that." "What?" "The blood pressure." So this leads us to the question: Does it really matter if you
believe in an alternate reality, if that alternate is arguably better
or makes you happier? "We accept the reality of the world
with which we're presented. It's as simple as that." In The Matrix, Cypher prefers
to be gaslit, because the lie leads to a more
comfortable existence. "I know that
when I put it in my mouth, the matrix is telling my brain
that it is juicy and delicious." "Ignorance is bliss." Likewise, in The Truman Show,
Jim Carrey's Truman Burbank - the world's biggest
unwitting reality TV star - is undeniably being
gaslit by the actors purporting to be his friends,
family, even his wife, in an artificial world
created just for him. "And the last thing
I'd ever do is lie to you." "And the last thing
that I would ever do is lie to you." But most of these people-
and the show's many adoring fans- don't see a problem with this, because they view Truman's fake life
in Seahaven as a kind of utopia. "I have given Truman the chance
to lead a normal life. The world, the place you live in,
is the sick place." Still, when Natasha McElhone's Sylvia plants a seed of doubt
in Truman's mind, "This! It's-it's fake!
It's all for you. And the sky and
the sea- everything!" Everything I've told you
is the truth!" he won't stop fixating on
the cracks in his perfect life until he's fully
uncovered the truth. And as if in a secret nod
to the origins of the Gaslighting term, the moment he begins
to really question his reality is triggered by
a light falling from the sky. The story sends the message
that human beings can't be truly contented
by lies forever. We will instinctively chase the truth,
and once we find it, the truth shall set us free. Jessica Jones similarly moves
the gaslighting trope forward through Jessica's response
to Kilgrave's behavior. She is able to recognize it
for what it is, and we see her trying
to put strategies in place to combat it, and foreground her
own version of reality. "You want me to choose?"
"Yes." "I choose that you don't touch me." "Oh, please."
"Ever!" Emmet Asher-Perrin writes, "One of the most potent things
a victim of gaslighting can do (if they are able) is to consistently challenge
their abusers' lies. And that is precisely
what Jessica does, over and over. Every time Kilgrave insists
they were happy together, she tells him nothing could be
further from the truth. Every time he tells her that she was sexually
attracted to him, she counters with the fact
that he raped her. "Getting you out of my head was
like prying fungus from a window." "I know your face, I saw you."
"You saw what you wanted to see." "I remember-"
"I remember everything!" The victory of the gaslighter
is to muddy the waters so much that it's hard to know
if there even is a verifiable truth. Facts give way to a plethora
of voices and opinions, and there's a sense
that all stories are equal. "The self is a kind of fiction,
for hosts and humans alike, it's a story we tell ourselves." "We can't to define consciousness
because consciousness does not exist." But while in our lives gaslighting
may make it hard to decipher what's real and what's not, in storytelling, the audience
gets to be that nonexistent third party in the privileged position
of knowing what the reality is. "Hey, I said this
isn't a library!" "Pick up that coffee.
Throw it in your face." And what stories like Jessica Jones,
The Truman Show, and The Girl On The Train reaffirm
is the existence and importance of an objective truth. The Post sends
the same message in the realm of
politics and journalism. Director Steven Spielberg talked about
how Trump's gaslighting tactics harked back to the Nixon administration
doing the same thing in 1971, which made the film urgent for him. "It just distorts the truth, it makes the truth
kind of interpretive, and the truth should be objective, it shouldn't have any wiggle room
for interpretation." The gaslighting trope is evidence
of how our culture can provide a language for something
we know is happening, but don't accurately know
how to describe. "Oh Rapunzel you know I hate
leaving you after a fight, especially when I've done
absolutely nothing wrong!" When you name and recognize
something like gaslighting, you're able to challenge it. "Everything you all have
is on that list." "That's not what our doctor said.
He said- well, that one's got absolutely nothing
to do with the other." Early iterations of the gaslighting
trope were more about victims being saved by someone else-
an outside party who can see what's
happening and intervene. Now, we see more victims
becoming aware of the abuse and taking steps
to stop it themselves. When you know what your enemy is,
it's easier to fight- to stand up for yourself
and reclaim your reality. "My whole life I've just been like,
'Take what you get, be happy that it's not worse." "Maybe that's not
good enough this time." This is The Take.
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