This Shit Isn't Bananas, G-A-S-L-I-G-H-T
A Dualist Approach to Gaslight (1944)
Gaslight (1944) – Dualist
If you’ve been following the news recently, I bet you’re feeling like you’re losing your god damn mind, and I am here to tell you that you are not. A few key idiots looking for crown jewels in a country that booted the monarchy 249 years ago are settling for the copper in the walls and ink siphoned straight from the Constitution itself. It’s real and it’s fucking bananas. But to honor their efforts, try as they and Chuck Schumer might to convince us this is business as usual, this week I watched George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944). Originally, I was going to review Gaslight next week for April Fools Day and fuck with my audience a bit, just some cheeky light gaslighting, but then Signalgate happened and I felt the need to reassure you all that no, the Vice President of the United States and Secretary of Defense and National Security Advisor and all those jabronies really did do all that. So, let’s discuss the April fool’s cunt of a cousin, the proverbial gaslight.
This week, the Review Roulette wheel landed on Dualist as our lens. If we wanted to go the obvious route, we could look at reality and fiction. Gaslight is a story about a guy everyone knows, Gregory (Charles Boyer), who “slowly and systematically” manipulates his wife, Paula (Ingrid Bergman), into thinking she is insane. We could talk about how Paula questions her reality and whether she can trust her own mind and senses as Gregory uses sleight of hand trickery and fear mongering to keep her in a constant state of anxious despair. Very Tucker Carlson of Gregory. If we wanted a differently obvious route, we could compare the two leading men – the other being Inspector Brian Cameron (Joseph Cotten) – and their opposing but parallel obsessions with Paula’s aunt, the beautiful opera singer Alice Alquist who was murdered 10 years before the events of the film and in whose house Paula and Gregory live.
But I don’t do obvious so let’s talk about ghosts.
Specifically, I want to talk about the ghosts of memory and the ghosts of perception. I’m aware that’s even more cryptic but hear me out. Starting with the latter, the ghosts of perception are the actual things Gregory is doing to break Paula’s mind: hiding the same picture regularly and claiming she doesn’t remember doing it herself; giving her objects and convincing her she has lost them because of her forgetfulness; hiding his personal possessions and accusing her of kleptomania. He breaks her trust in her own perceptions and replaces her view with one he has invented. The footsteps she hears in the attic, the voices and rustling keeping her up at night, they are all in her head, as every woman has heard at least once from a man claiming to know her mind better than she. By the climax of the film, Paula is concerned that she cannot even trust what she had seen in front of her own eyes only moments before: a ghost, a figment of the imagination, or a true, physical, tangible person? These ghosts are planted and planned, designed solely for her, to break her and render her controllable.
The former ghosts, those of memory, are the more interesting of the two and are far more coincidental. For Paula, her memory is a haunted place consumed by the tragic moment when she found her aunt’s lifeless body in the house they once shared and in which she now lives with Gregory. This haunting seems to become real when ghosts of that past life start to reappear in her life as almost warnings to steer clear of her crazy ass husband. For instance, when Paula sensibly wants to take a beat to see if her feelings for Gregory are real after their two weeks of acquaintance in Italy, she heads to Lake Como on a train and just happens to meet Miss Thwaites (Dame May Whitty). Miss Thwaites is heading for London back to her residence across the square from Paula’s once and future home, dredging up all sorts of painful memories for Paula, but more importantly, asking her if she will be safe alone. Unfortunately for them both, Gregory’s bonkers ass is waiting for her at the precise carriage she is on to make sure she doesn’t have a moment’s clarity to think through their whirlwind romance.
Brian likewise has a ghost of his past – that of Alice Alquist – pass by him in complete coincidence when both Paula and Gregory, and Brian and his niece and nephew are out for the day in the city’s center of torture, the Tower of London. This random encounter with Brian’s past boyhood crush is the only reason Paula is rescued in the present.
This interplay between ghosts of perception and memory is fascinating. In one, the manipulation is being orchestrated by the worst guy you’ve ever met, underpinned by his smug little smile when Paula is responding well to his mental torture. In the other, the cycles of the past recurring in the present plant seeds not only for Paula but also for the audience that Gregory is not to be trusted and that she is not safe. Both types of ghosts play with the mind and make one question whether what has just happened is real or not; whether reality can be trusted at face value or if some grand illusion is at play; whether one can trust one’s gut with all its past experiences guiding a judgement or if one’s mind has become corrupted so far that it must rely on another’s.
In order to dispel Paula’s ghosts – of both perception and memory as Gregory’s current torture is compounded by the living memories of her aunt’s murder in their drawing room – Brian must heed his intuition when he sees the ghost of Alice walk past him, living, breathing, and heading back to her own den of torture.
We all currently are plagued by ghosts of perception with our own government telling us what our eyes and ears are truly seeing and hearing, but trust that they are only ghosts and that by heeding the warnings and alarm bells going off constantly, we can stay sane enough to fight back against them. You are not imagining things. It really is just all of the worst type of guy letting their incomprehensible incompetence shine with the unearned confidence of a spotlight of centuries’ worth of glittering white supremacist ghosts of perception. Don’t let them take what you know to be true. You’re doing amazing.
Because I’m Never Done When I Say I Am
Actor’s Oeuvre
Of course, the real gaslighting in this film is that anyone in it is the nationality they say they are, apart from Angela Lansbury, naturally. Bergman and Cotton don’t even try to conceal their iconic strong Swedish and American accents, and Boyer’s is so clearly not Italian it’s not even a spoiler to say that. But Lansbury as a cockney slag is pitch perfect which is even more impressive because Gaslight is Lansbury’s debut, and I’m starting to think her filmography might be reference material for the buffoons playing Big Boy Job in the actual White House. State of the Union (1948) is about corruption in the US federal government; The Manchurian Candidate (1962) is about installing a Russian asset as president; Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) is about witchcraft and Nazis; hell, half these ding dongs think they’re Gaston from Beauty and the Beast (1991) when they’re really LeFou. I swear Lansbury was trying to warn us. That’s why she wrote all that murder.