Gaslighting, Explained | What Does It Meme?

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"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 right under the surface. Thank you so much to CuriosityStream for sponsoring today's video! Since you're watching this channel, we know you love learning new things. That's why we think you'll love CuriosityStream. It's the best way to access thousands of award-winning documentaries and non-fiction TV shows on any device any time, anywhere. Right now they're offering our viewers a special deal. Just enter the promo code THETAKE at checkout to pay $14.99 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. What do you want our take on next? This video is brought to you by CuriosityStream, a streaming service that offers thousands of original and exclusive documentaries. They feature over 35 collections of curative programs that are hand picked by experts and they also have incredible non-fiction TV shows and docs on everything from history to nature, science, food, technology, and travel. One documentary you can check out right now on CuriosityStream is What is Reality? Neurologist and bestselling author David Eagleman reveals how our brains piece together reality and how we might expand our perception of the world around us. Right now, CuriosityStream is offering our viewers 25% off annual memberships. Just click the link in our description below curiositystream.com/thetake and use the promo code THETAKE to sign up and receive a whole year of CuriosityStream for just $14.99.
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Channel: The Take
Views: 429,954
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: gaslighting, gaslight, jessica jones, midsommar, a doll's house, the invisible man, unbelievable, donald trump, #metoo movement, black lives matter, the matrix, the truman show, jane eyre, elementary, hysteria, hush... hush sweet charlotte, the girl on the train, dangerous crossing, overboard, mean girls, how to lose a guy in 10 days, 10 things i hate about you, friends, friends we were on a break, coronation street, the archers, homeland, westworld, the post, spotlight, dark waters
Id: eN4la0xOBdM
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Length: 22min 7sec (1327 seconds)
Published: Sat Jan 23 2021
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