Obviously “gaslighting” as a description (often misused) of someone convincing someone else that they’re insane by altering and then denying reality has grown in popularity in the last 10 years, but I just got around to watching the film starring Ingrid Bergman. And I gotta say, the gas lights were unnecessary.
The film is a period piece set in 1880s because it needs to have gas lights in it, but Gregory begins his campaign of terror with a missing broach. Then a missing letter, and a missing pocket watch, and noises coming from the sealed-off attic. He combines these props with more generic emotional and psychological abuse, keeping Paula confined to the house, turning the maid against her, convincing her that her mother died in an insane aslyum, etc.
And yes, there are gas lights that dim at the same time Gregory is clomping around in the attic, but all they serve to do is to augment the clomping (which Gregory convinces Paula can’t possibly be happening). Take the gas lights out of the movie and everything still works just fine.
What a rip off.
(This is not a serious rant, and since this is a remake of a 1940 British film which was a remake of a 1938 stage play, maybe they added the clomping to make it more clear to a wider American audience.)
What are you talking about? Gaslights are featured extensively in the play! They’re the very most important thing about the whole work. Clearly you must just be misremembering. Here, let me get you a drink to settle your nerves.
I was hanging out with my ex-wife and her boyfriend and the term gaslighting came up. He had us going for way too long about how he had never heard the term before in his life and we were just making it up.
I mainly remember that this movie (or one other with the same title) had a note with two words I had to look up: ‘skein’ and ‘relict.’ So I learned two new words, if not much about gas lighting. Maybe three words: I knew that ‘worsted’ had something to do with clothing or dry goods, but I had to look it up for specifics.
You know the SNL skit, referenced above? Bergman really does over- (under-?) act like that throughout the film. I’m like, “Come on, woman! You deserve to be gaslit! Wake up!”
It’s a good bit of cinema history to see, but it is a bit of a slog.
