on Gaslight

Was it a weird choice? Maybe, but I wanted to feel less alone...

“You’re not going out of your mind, you’re slowly and systematically being driven out of your mind.”

It’s a bizarre ordeal to watch a movie you loved as a child with a new awareness, with the lived experience and familiarity of the issues being explored by the fictional characters onscreen. The magic goes away and, in my case, instead of the memories of feeling cool and grownup at slumber parties showing friends an “old movie,” the main character is now a mirror and it almost hurts to watch. I think it’s important to do this though, to revisit beloved cinema with the maturity to appreciate it in a different way.

We had Gaslight (1944, directed by George Cukor and starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer) on VHS, sandwiched between two other old thrillers on the same tape, recorded by my dad at some point when it was shown on a classic film channel. We had a whole cabinet full of these homemade bootlegs, a treasure trove for me and my sister to rummage through on summer days that were too hot to play outside and on nights when primetime TV was all reruns. I loved (and still do) classic suspense films. Along with Rear Window and Rebecca, Gaslight was a favorite at our house.

Gaslight’s horror is quiet and psychological. It’s dark and it’s suffocating, it’s the resignedly loathsome feeling of being confined to a stuffy indoors while watching your life get smaller and increasingly not your own. Ingrid Bergman’s Paula is being coerced, so much so she stops trusting her own instincts and memory. Her controlling husband is a con man, and the more the audience realizes this the more we see her fall prey to his deception into believing that she is losing her mind.

About a month after I finally exited a very abusive relationship, and before I had it in me to start writing about it, I started watching a lot of true crime videos on youtube. I don’t know if I was showing myself that I made it out alive or I could have easily met my demise if I had stuck around but I was actively triggering myself, perhaps as a way to reinforce my decision to get out and stay out of that situation. To continue the theme, I decided to watch Gaslight. It was the first time I had seen it in years. Was it a weird choice? Maybe. I wanted to feel less alone, I wanted to remind myself that this is a thing that happens, and what happened to me was not unique or rare.

I couldn’t keep my eyes off Paula’s face. Bergman is an incredible actor. She says so much in her pained expressions without ever having to say a word. I recognized those pained expressions as ones I’ve felt take over my own face in similar situations.

We see the discomfort in her restless eyes during an awkward conversation on a train with an older woman unwittingly blathering on a sensitive subject, we see the passive disagreement in her brow when her husband first lays down the groundwork of the altered reality he is creating for her, we see so much frustration, bewilderment, and fear in her eyes when he presses this altered reality onto her, so much shame around her mouth and downturned eyes when he reinforces it for her in front of other people, and ultimately we see the glory and clarity on her face once she deconstructs her gilded cage and confronts her husband and his treachery.

Gaslight perfectly and accurately depicts this common domestic abuse, and that the film title was coined into a term to describe the act of manipulating a person into questioning their own perception, memory, and judgment makes complete sense.

It can be a hard one to watch, especially for those who have had to endure actual gaslighting, but for me re-watching Gaslight after so many years was oddly comforting. It felt validating for me to go through it again with Paula and to emerge as triumphantly as she does when the worst of it is over.

You can watch Gaslight (1944) online for free here.