But we soon we realize that it is Gregory who has been hiding these things, repeating his recitations that she’s so absent-minded, manipulating Paula so she will start to question her own judgment and sanity. He repeatedly tells her that she’s forgetful, careless, maybe even a kleptomaniac.
Possessions start to go missing - a brooch, a watch, a picture on the wall - and each time Gregory, in a blood-curdlingly patronizing tone of voice, convinces Paula that she misplaced them. As they settle into their new home, though, things tumble rapidly downhill. Gregory first starts acting erratically when he and Paula are going through Aunt Alice’s belongings when Paula finds a letter from a man named Sergius Bauer, addressed to her aunt and dated a few days before her death, Gregory suddenly snatches it out of her hands. 2) the very same home in which the aunt’s murder took place. They marry, she gives up her opera studies, and he insists they make a home for themselves in London, in (psychologically dubious decision no. All’s well until she falls in love with a charming Italian man named Gregory (Boyer). Paula’s remaining relatives whisk her away from London and set up a new life for her in Italy, where they make a decision - the first of several in this film that a therapist might find quite dubious - to train Paula to be an opera singer just like her dead aunt. The film also stars Charles Boyer (who, at the time, insisted on billing above a lesser-known Bergman, although history has sorted that out), an annoyingly chivalrous Joseph Cotten, and, most notably, an 18-year-old Angela Lansbury, in her first film role, portraying an insubordinate maid named Nancy with a saucy Cockney accent.īergman plays a woman named Paula, who as a girl discovered the body of her aunt (and sole guardian) after the aunt had been strangled to death by an intruder in their home. “Gaslighting” - lying to someone so charismatically and manipulatively that they start to believe they are insane - had been a buzzword in the feminist blogosphere for a while, but its crossover moment came last year thanks to articles like the widely shared op-ed by Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca titled “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America.” “At the hands of Trump,” she wrote, “facts have become interchangeable with opinions, blinding us into arguing amongst ourselves, as our very reality is called into question.” In 2017, the idea of gaslighting is near inescapable.īefore it was an SEO tag, Gaslight was a George Cukor movie - made in 1944, adapted from a play by Patrick Hamilton, and starring Ingrid Bergman in the first of three roles for which she’d win an Oscar. It’s suddenly everywhere: The New York Times, CNN, and even Psychology Today have all used it in headlines the Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran a thorough blog post on its etymology. Surely you’ve heard the word “gaslight” in the past couple of months, if not the past couple of hours.
#GASLIGHT 1944 OPENLOAD MOVIE#
In this retrogressive cultural climate, it makes a certain amount of sense that an early contender for the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year actually comes to us from Gaslight - a movie from 1944, based on a play from 1938, which takes place in the 1880s. My book club is not the only one currently reading It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’s satirical 1935 novel speculating what would have happened if an economic-nationalist-turned-totalitarian had beaten FDR for the presidency in ’36. 1984 is back on the best-seller list copies of The Handmaid’s Tale are flying off the shelves. Since the election of Donald Trump - in this disorienting moment when American democracy and the nature of truth itself are both on shaky ground - it has been both a comfort and a shock to engage with art that feels eerily prophetic.
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