Wow, is Eddie Murphy amazing in here. Everything in this film is conspicuously constructed around his performance, and I don’t know how many movies achieve the kind of singular status as star vehicles that this one did. It’s also a reminder of how a screenplay often depends on solid structure and the techniques of filmmaking in order to work. The plot is thin; the characters are thin; the beats are familiar. It’s fine. That satisfying rattle and hum you hear when you watch this movie is the mechanics of everything falling into place because the right people came together to make it work. The supporting cast really holds the ground under Murphy’s feet as he struts about like a comedy god; choices in costuming and editing really pop; the music is outer space great. It’s a B movie that scrapped its way onto the A-list, and not all the choices hold up as well (I’m looking at you, odd font choice for the credits sequence, not to mention a few canceled 80s tropes), but overall it does hold up.
Blackhat (Michael Mann, 2015)
All I remembered from when Blackhat came out is that it was received as this huge misfire and flop. Fans of the Rewatchables podcast know that those guys are huge Michael Mann boosters, so when this came up, I was like, “Huh. I’ve seen almost all his other movies. Might as well.” Which is kind of the exact same way I’d recommend it. If you’ve seen all Mann’s other movies, you might as well. It’s too long, and I feel like Chris Hemsworth—much as I love the dude—was miscast. But it’s pretty solid, the kind of espionage action thriller you might associate more with the 70s. What it does most interestingly is shift gears about midway through; at first, you’re watching a cat-and-mouse global caper where a team of good guys tracks a bad guy. Then the last third shifts into revenge thriller mode, and what it really illustrates to me is how terrifyingly unaccountable someone like Hemsworth’s character can be when there are no rules holding him back. In this story, you’re emotionally along for his ride, but then you wonder, “And what is he gonna do now?” Huh.
Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
For hopefully obvious reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about toxic masculinity and white fragility in the last few years, and a lot of the films I’ve chosen to watch pulled me into their orbit because I’d hoped they could interrogate these ideas productively. It’s been way more than a decade since I saw Blue Velvet (maybe two), and it might have been the first proper Lynch movie I ever saw, after Dune. Visually and aurally dazzling, I hadn’t really reckoned before with how assiduously Lynch packs his plot and dialogue with inanity and subversive humor. I can only imagine how thrilling—and/or frustrating—it must have been to be on the front lines of film criticism in 1986, wrestling with whether Blue Velvet was ironic or sincere, profound or silly, and the degree to which conclusions on those issues determined just how well one could tolerate the trials endured by Dorothy Vallens for the sake of the film’s protagonist and antagonist.
Generally speaking, I think it’s boilerplate but true to extol Lynch as a master of his craft. Almost nobody tightropes this dreamlike mode as well as he does; I also think he’s usually most successful when he packages his strangeness accessibly. There’s a reason why you hear more casual cinephiles still love Twin Peaks and Mulholland Dr. but only diehards will puzzle over why you didn’t love Inland Empire as much as they did. At his best, Lynch is simply captivating with his sound and images, and I’m willing to be swept along even if I’m not tracking with how everything fits together.
I wasn’t as satisfied with Blue Velvet this time around. Besides my prudish tendencies, I guess I wasn’t sold on what we’re supposed to do with the duality of Jeffrey and Frank as two sides of the same coin. It may be more honest for Lynch to simply recognize this truth and move on: the happy-clappy ending strikes me as deliberately ironic, a case of negative contrast if I ever saw one, making me doubt the veracity of light and goodness but not providing much else for resolution. At the same time, the point of view of the film is really centered in the privilege of the white male in all his perversity and latent control issues. It feels to me like Lynch is trying to grapple with this and maybe critique it, but I also think that he glides too close to the sun aesthetically; his style is so utterly captivating that we can’t hear or see anything other than what the white male gaze presents (or distorts). So Sandy is a glowing blonde madonna, Dorothy is a mesmerizing fallen whore, etc. Lynch, like Scorsese, is utterly fascinated by the problematic power of this perspective. He saddles the audience with it; it’s totalizing. The fact that it’s so (re)watchable in itself feels a bit wrong to me. Which, I suppose, might be the point. But I’ve always struggled a bit with films that leave the viewer no choice but to be indicted. Is that intentional on Lynch’s part? Or has the benefit of the doubt I’ve extended it gotten way too overextended? Kudos (I guess) to Lynch for making a film complex enough that I don’t think there’s a solution to that problem.
Cooley High (Michael Schultz, 1975)
Kudos to Unspooled for prompting me to watch this. Having watched American Graffiti and Fast Times at Ridgemont High relatively recently, Cooley High strikes me as a livelier, more trenchant variant of the American bildungsroman focused on teen shenanigans. Honestly, it’s just a better film, and more impressive for how much it does with a limited budget. Besides looking great and showcasing an unreal set of performances led by Glynn Turman and Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, I love that it was set in Chicago. From the opening montage, it was a momentary shock simply to see a skyline other than L.A. or New York. Cooley High makes the most of its locations, production design, lighting, and costumes to sell us on the time, place, and mood. I loved spending time with these characters, I loved the soundtrack, and I was utterly heartbroken by the climax.
Fright Night (Tom Holland, 1985)
On the downside: women are not treated well in this film; not by the film’s perspective. But having rewatched Rear Window just month, it occurred to me that the opening of Fright Night steals shamelessly and productively from the central conceit of forcing you to root for people in a toxic relationship to find their way together because there’s a monster living just across the way. Chris Sarandon is just about the platonic ideal of tall, dark, and handsome; he’s one of the best screen vampires. Fright Night is knowing and earnest about the tropes it employs; its tone feels like a precursor for Buffy the Vampire Slayer in mostly the right ways. Basically, this film was a blast to watch, and I look forward to returning to it.
I’d always liked this film, and I think the glut of found-footage horror films from the last decade—not least of which among them are the Paranormal Activity sequels/spinoffs—really obscured what made this one so effective in the first place. The jump scares do not, sadly, work quite as well upon repeat viewing as they do the first time. (And if you’re not one who enjoys the ghost train-style shocks in the first place, I could see this film being an especially tough sit for you.) The strength of Paranormal Activity is actually the toxicity of the relationship at its center.
The deadly mistake of the sequels in terms of narrative vitality was the commitment to an ever-expanding lore soaked in conspiracy and fatalism. Fun though they are, the outcome for each of them is essentially a foregone conclusion, bound by the exigencies of continuity. It’s easy to stop caring or believing in the agency of the characters, because many of them are just going to end up where the filmmakers need them to be in order for them to tie back to the events laid out in the original film.
But in the original film itself, very little of the elaborate backstory is present. There’s simply a woman haunted by a demon who has outrun or overcome its appetite for decades. Until, that is, she moved in with her world-class A-hole of a boyfriend. Without charting the ins-and-outs of their relationship, I can say that it strikes me as one that makes sense, and one that would probably be somewhat workable without the catastrophic external pressure of a supernatural predator.
The genius of Paranormal Activity, as in many stripped-down horror films, is that it gives an externalized form to the emotional and psychological dynamics preying upon the main character. In this case, it’s a boyfriend who gaslights, undermines, and low-key bullies her persistently until she finally gives in to the demon rather than fight with her boyfriend. Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat are really marvelous at playing out the toxic dynamic, and they maintain and unfold the tension between the jump scares. This is a really sharply-observed-and-edited film, and the central tragedy is that—unlike the sequels—Katie does have better options, but commits instead to a deeply unhealthy relationship until it’s too late to stop what’s coming.
Salesman (Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin, 1969)
I can only imagine what it might have been like to watch this movie in a pre-Glengarry world; the patter, the character types, the desperation and swagger are all here, minus the f-bombs. This is one that’s been sticking with me, though, in large part because the directors rather fortuitously happened to land on Bible salesmen. Of all the possible products they could be hawking, Bibles. A number of scenes in the film are chilling, in no small part for the pathos lurking around the edges of the otherwise unsparing, almost austere black and white frames. Everything in the world of this movie feels compromised, and it’s upsetting to see the Holy Bible right in the center of it.
Upgrade (Leigh Whannell, 2018)
Place a marker: if he keeps a steady hand, Leigh Whannell may establish himself as a filmmaker with the stature of John Carpenter in his prime. Upgrade is exactly the kind of exploitation flick with a social point of view that I crave more of, and I’m delighted to be terrified in all right ways by what Whannell delivered. So when you hear Alexa talking to you unbidden, just remember that Upgrade warned you.☕︎
We have all, it seems, been inundated with gaslighting in the last several years. According to Google Trends, the relative popularity of “gaslighting” as a search term laid low until near the end of 2013. After percolating for a few years, there was a spike in May 2015, with another, larger spike from December 2016 to January 2017. From that time to the present, Google Trends marks a fairly steady rise in the relative popularity of gaslighting as a search term. (I’m new to using this tool, so I’m sure there’s a lot more, better data to play with out there on the Web than what I’m presenting here.) Intriguingly, the spike in May 2015 occurs a month before our current president heaved down his golden escalator into the geopolitical stage. Correlating almost too obviously with the next big spike is Lauren Duca’s op-ed in Teen Vogue, titled “Donald Trump is Gaslighting America,” which appeared in December 2016, overlapping the period from Trump’s election to his inauguration.
From 2016 onward, a loyal Vox reader could have observed the cultural penetration of “gaslighting” in real time. In January 2017, Alissa Wilkinson finally wrote an explainer highlighting 1944’s Gaslight as the best explainer for what is meant by the “gaslighting.” Based on the film, Wilkinson says that its use would be “rather specific: when a person lies for their own gain to another person so repeatedly and with so much confidence that the victim begins to doubt her own sanity.” By now, dozens and dozens of articles on the site have invoked the term. For instance, in July 2019, one of Aaron Rupar’s dispatches on one of President Trump’s impromptu press conferences was titled, “Trump’s latest press conference was a master class in gaslighting.” By and large, the way the term is used is more in line with the definition Wilkinson outlines near the beginning of her explainer, “when candidates claimed something had (or hadn’t) happened, and refused, when confronted with contradictory evidence, to acknowledge otherwise.” This is the way that Rupar uses the term in the story above, and that seems to be the gist of the term in the context of political coverage more generally, as illustrated by Duca’s op-ed.
With “gaslighting” having become a commonplace tag in political discourse, Alan Jacobs recently wrote a provocative post in which he contends that use of the term “gaslighting” is “an extreme form of Bulverism,” meaning that instead of trying to prove that what your opponent stands for is wrong, you assume that he’s wrong and simply explain why he’s acting in such bad faith. Jacobs’s main point is that accusing someone of gaslighting is an increasingly common tactic among partisans who are more interested in establishing discursive dominance than they are in earnest exchanges of opinion based on the best available facts. This is, as he sees it, a symptom of proliferating extremism. Jacobs does not suggest we stop using the term “gaslighting,” but he does observe that it is “One of the more pernicious quirks of English usage to arise in the last few years,” and it has become a “default explanation for disagreement” among people dedicated to the project of keeping their “echo chamber hermetically sealed.”
A lot of the weight in his phrasing falls on whether gaslighting is the default setting or not. How do we establish that it’s a mere rhetorical reflex? What is it that makes it the “default,” as opposed to a well-considered diagnostic label? I do agree with Jacobs that it makes it easier for partisans with a conscience to tell themselves that the only way to advance their goals is through the pure exercise of power. This is why many so many hacks adopt Bulverism as a conscious strategy. “When did you stop beating your wife?” is maybe a bit antiquated of a rhetorical trap anymore. Asking that question, however leading, still gives your opponent the opportunity to respond. Better to pivot to the audience and say, “Here’s my explainer for why my opponent lies about beating his wife.” Whether or not this is the default setting, it is distressingly commonplace.
Our media ecosystem incentivizes Bulverism. We’ve siloed ourselves in bubbles where we consume data that is carefully curated to feed our addictions, not to give us relevant, verifiable facts. We no longer consume competing articles, each of which asking the other side when they stopped beating their wife. We consume explainers written by partisans whom we deliberately have placed in our media trapline because we know they already agree with us. What is the point of the author asking an opponent why the opponent beats his wife in that scenario, when he could simply supply the answer and stroke both the id and ego of his readership? Given the current reality of our attention economy and the incentive structure for our brain-hacking, algorithmic overlords to bypass dialogue entirely, Jacobs is rightly suspicious of “gaslighting” as a term used by default to tar one’s political adversaries.
It’s worth taking stock of how widespread “gaslighting” has become as a descriptive term and the dangers inherent in promulgating its use. To the extent that “gaslighting” can be abused in the way that terms like “fascist,” “nazi,” “antifa,” “socialist,” and “communist” are evoked pejoratively (and often inaccurately), we all would be better off if we exhibited more restraint. Certainly. Yet there are verifiably true instances where those labels accurately capture the phenomena in question and the stakes involved. The nazis who marched in Charlottesville. The antifa gunman in Portland. Much as we should exhibit informed restraint when deploying labels, we should also feel compelled to use them when no other term will do. Sometimes gaslighting is gaslighting. By its nature, gaslighting is probably trickier to pin down than some of these other labels. So let’s take a look at the film that did the most to popularize the term and see what we can learn about gaslighting and its function.
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Adapted from a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton, Gaslight focuses on the efforts of Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer) to drive his wife, Paula (Ingrid Bergman), into doubting her own sanity, in order that he may search without attracting suspicion for some precious jewels that belonged to her aunt, whom he’d murdered years before. Along the way, Gregory carries on a brazen flirtation with Nancy (Angela Lansbury), Paula’s chambermaid, while Brian Cameron (Joseph Cotten), a Scotland Yard detective with a personal connection to Paula’s aunt, takes an interest in her current plight. The film ends with Brian helping Paula realize that she’s not going mad, and Gregory is arrested for the murder and attempted theft of the jewels. (Disclosure: I haven’t seen the British film from 1940. I guess it’s pretty good, too?)
The title refers to the flame on the gas lamps in Paula and Gregory’s Victorian London townhouse, which dim every night as Gregory searches for the jewels. I wasn’t attentive enough during my viewing to discern whether he diverts the gas to search for the jewels or superfluously dims them just so he can convince Paula that she’s imagining things. Either way, it’s an objectively real phenomenon that Gregory knowingly lies about in order to lead Paula to doubt her own perceptions of reality.
The genius of Gaslight comes down to the quirk of its gothic trappings. Gregory’s plot is ridiculously elaborate. His goal, after all, is simply to gain access to Paula’s aunt’s townhouse to search for the jewels he failed to nab a decade earlier. I’m not professional thief, but it seems to me that there have got to be easier ways to forage surreptitiously for treasure. Let’s set aside, for now, the fact that he waited for ten years to go looking for the jewels, and that he pinned all of his hopes on being able to woo and marry Paula when she came of age and—if that’s not a slender enough margin for error—to dupe her into moving back to the townhouse where her aunt was murdered. The Scooby-Doo complexity of his scheme is part of the package for a story like this. Over-elaborate schemes are a bit nonsensical when you think of them merely as a gothic trope, but when you consider it as a core component of Gregory’s character, then it raises some more interesting questions.
Why does he have to convince Paula that she’s losing her mind in order to give himself cover to rummage around in her attic? Why not just marry and murder her? If that might attract too many unwanted questions, then why not develop a less complicated ruse? Why not just inveigle Paula into a social set that would keep her complacently out of the house for sufficient time to conduct his nocturnal hunt? All I’m saying is: it’s an awful lot of work to convince his wife that she’s going mad, and—honestly—rather miserable. Why this method and not any other?
There are two answers, really, to that last question. The first is a thematic concern of the type of story it is. Gothic fiction is often about constructing hysterical women, but not all gothic fiction cares or thinks as deeply about the process of how a villain constructs a hysterical woman from the clay of a vulnerable woman. Gaslight is really about the myriad ways that men exert control women’s spirits by falsely convincing them that they’re hysterical. On that level, Gaslight is a master class, and Ingrid Bergman is overly theatrical in a way that fits the film’s critique of Victorian patriarchy. Her performance reads to me as a commentary on how women contort themselves to perform for men, trying to sally over ever-shifting goalposts, even when the role they are playing in a rigged game is decidedly self-destructive. In a way, Paula performs hysteria because those are the notes Gregory is playing for her. George Cukor uses the production design and lighting always to adjust the level of claustrophobia as Gregory fights to puppeteer Paula. Everything about the film fires off red flares about Gregory’s toxicity from the get-go, but Paula is never portrayed as irrational. If anything, her manifest anxiety is a rational fear of induced hysteria.
The other answer to why Gregory chooses to gaslight his wife is part of the thematic thrust of the film’s commentary on patriarchy, and maybe the reason why it’s such an apposite term for our era. The simple truth is that Gregory is a cruel, petty man. He played the suitor to Paula’s aunt, and I gather that he was both rejected and denied his opportunity to steal the jewels. In a fit of rage, he murdered the aunt, and he clearly never recovered from his humiliation. The torment he inflicts on Paula is displaced, spiteful projection. It’s also clear that he simply enjoys wielding power, and he lacks the imagination to wield it in any way other than cruelly. Here’s a man who has successfully wooed and married a famous opera singer; she’s one of the most beautiful women in the world; she desires nothing so much as to please him; her wealth and status could open to him any number of doors as an artist and would-be social climber. All of that strokes his ego, but he builds on none of it. All he wants is the sparkly little rocks and to punish his wife while he pursues them. The reason why he chooses such an unlikely and elaborate plan is because he enjoys being petty and cruel.
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One of the most incisive essays I’ve read about the Trump era is Adam Serwer’s “The Cruelty is the Point,” which appeared in the Atlantic in October 2018. In it, he reflects on a photograph of a lynching, then draws it into conversation with the actions of the administration and how they feed into the image that the president constructs of himself and his supporters as defenders of a certain order. (Read: entrenched, cis, straight, white, Christian patriarchy.) Serwer observes, “It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.” The social solidarity that one finds in old photographs of lynching, Serwer observes, encapsulates a lot of the performative grievance culture that binds together the MAGA mob.
Despite being a charlatan, a bottom-feeder, and a murderer, Gregory exhibits all the traits of entitlement. And when I say “exhibits,” I mean that he performs his sense of entitlement constantly. There’s a scene about a third of the way into the film where Gregory browbeats Paula into summoning Nancy to stoke the fire in the drawing room. Paula wants to put some coal on the fire herself, but he stands on principle that servants are there to serve. (Naturally, he forces Paula to articulate the principle, rather than verbalize it himself.) When Paula gives in and rings for Nancy, the maid asks, “Did you ring, sir?” Gregory immediately replies:
No, your mistress rang… Well, go on, my dear, why don’t you tell Nancy what you rang for?
This is Gregory as performer. First, her performs the role of lord of the manor, chastising his wife for not playing the part of a true lady. Next, he makes a grand show of Paula supposed pretensions, outing her to her servant as a decadent invalid who refuses to feed her own coal into the fireplace. At all times and in all places—except for his fervid search for the jewels—Gregory must play the part of the perfect gentleman, the perfect husband, the perfect aristocrat. Performative entitlement in Gregory’s hands has one goal: driving his wife to hysteria. He doesn’t do it because he has to. It doesn’t help him in any material way. He does it because he wants to, and because he it’s not enough for him to exercise power; he has to be perceived exercising it. His sense of entitlement is only validated if he can feel other people feeling his power. It’s the same reason that a mob would pose for a photograph indicting them for the racist torture and murder of an innocent man. It’s the same impulse that drives Trump and his supporters to chant “Lock her up!” together for the cameras at rallies.
Gregory is cruel because that’s who he is; it’s his principle pleasure in life. Without it, he’s just another grubbing, no-account criminal skating by on his charisma, and he is temperamentally and constitutionally incapable of finding meaning in anything else. Consider the things that most normal men in 1944 might have considered worthy accomplishments.
He marries a beautiful, kind, vivacious, and talented woman. He is not a good husband to her; he carries open flirtations with other women to humiliate her.
He gains entrance into high society. He does not grow into his role; he squanders his cachet knocking around in the attic hunting for jewels.
I could go on. Cruelty is who Gregory is and what he does, not because it’s necessary for his survival or his goals, but because it’s the only way he can wring meaning from his twisted, unexamined preoccupations. He defines himself by his cruelty; his liberty to inflict it at will upon Paula is his crowning accomplishment in life.
Thinking about Gregory’s narcissistic sadism, I don’t think I can overstate the diagnostic power of gaslighting. To say that someone is engaging in gaslighting is to diagnose a very specific nexus of behavioral and character traits. Not everyone accused of gaslighting is guilty of it, any more than every right-winger accused of fascism is a fascist. Prof. Jacobs sagely warns us against the proclivity to weaponize legitimate diagnostic labels because doing so dilutes their power and shreds our common capacity to participate in a meaningful discourse. He’s warning us that not only should we stop emptying signifiers, we definitely shouldn’t do so by pouring them over our opponents’ heads. But gaslighting in itself is the rare discursive signifier that is not in danger of being emptied of meaning in this particular moment. On the contrary, I think it brims with untapped diagnostic potential.
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The American version of Gaslight came out in 1944, adapted from a play written for the stage in 1939, concerning a story set in the late 1800s. The phenomenon depicted is not new to us; it wasn’t new to audiences in the 1940s, and it wasn’t new to the Victorians. The privileged we shall always have with us, as they have ever been, and so long as there are cruel, entitled classes of people, there will always be gaslighting.
Time-honored tradition has embedded the practice of gaslighting in our discourse, our institutions, and our individual relations. Is it any wonder, really, that hysteria is the default setting for people who imbibe social media through a digital IV drip? Paula’s epistemic nightmare is the same from which we are all trying to awake. The proliferating Bulverism Jacobs identifies seems to me like a symptom of how foundational gaslighting truly is to the way we do politics.
I was watching The War Room (1993) last month, and I was reminded of just how often and smoothly Bill Clinton and his enablers gaslit the public about a variety of matters related to his sexual escapades. I also have vivid emotional memories of the rolling carnival of gaslighting that characterized the George W. Bush administration as it bumbled its way into Iraq and then labored strenuously to mislead the world about the region’s prospects. (“Mission Accomplished,” indeed.) In these and probably millions of other cases throughout the pageant of human history, political leaders have deployed the inception of epistemological (or even ontological) uncertainty as a tool of control. Donald Trump didn’t invent gaslighting; he hasn’t even perfected it. (If he were literate, I’d advise him to read Niccolo Machiavelli, who himself may have exposited many politically useful examples of gaslighting in ancient Roman history, had he had access to the term as we have.)
Watching Gaslight really crystalized for me a few things about the power and utility of art. For one thing, the film itself is just stellar, and the characters are so well-drawn that they take on a paradigmatic stature. But like all great art, Gaslight captured and distilled an already-existing phenomenon and gave it a name. And the phenomenon as signified by this film continues to exist, and in forms so little changed that Gaslight remains indispensable as a way to articulate it.
Here, I guess, is where we end up, with Prof. Jacobs’s initial critique. Gaslight is an incredible film because it still speaks to us, and it speaks to us because gaslighting is so regrettably commonplace. Am I participating in Bulverism myself by saying so? Are my examples so laced with my preexisting prejudices that I have only proven his point after all? Have I simply assumed that my targets are wrong, and expended more than 3,400 words in the presumption of explaining how they came to be that way? Maybe. Maybe the lights don’t really dim at night. Maybe I’m just imagining all of it.
Let’s say I’m not.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that cruel people exist in sufficient numbers that we ought to be concerned about them building a cultural coalition founded on a profoundly misplaced sense of entitlement. Admittedly, I’ve repeatedly struck the same chords over the course of this little essay, and the melody sounds a lot like #OrangeManBad. One of the potential dangers of Trump losing re-election is that gaslighting as a diagnostic term is relegated to the dustbin of history—or to the fever swamps of right-wing apologists. At present, I think it’s simply true that the confluence of cruelty, entitlement, and charlatanism is sweeping through the conservative movement like the torrential gush of a broken dam. But gaslighting isn’t a partisan tactic. And I suspect it’s so deep-seated as a reflexive tactic that critics of Trump and the Republican Party are probably oblivious to their own potential to deploy gaslighting on an industrial scale the way Trump World has.
The unstaunchable deluge of bullshit unloaded from Trump’s perpetually puckered oral cavity has generated an understandable resurgence of the term as a descriptor of his rhetorical strategy. The so-called “post-truth era” certainly has found him to be an able avatar. The combination of his narcissistic addiction to mass media exposure and his pathological compulsion to lie about every subject conceivable to the human imagination means that there is a deep reservoir of examples of times that we’ve been gaslight by him and his enablers. Trump is not sophisticated about this, and maybe a lot of us get especially enraged that he keeps gaslighting us even though we have hours of footage of the lamps burning low. But narcissistic addiction to mass media exposure and a pathological compulsion to lie are not traits unique to the GOP. Without resort to gaslighting as a descriptor, will we be able to name it when it’s not the Bad Orange Man, but someone or something else? Maybe someone or something we’d prefer to believe is trustworthy and upright? At minimum, we know that the Republican Party and its base are totally bought into gaslighting as a strategy. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Like any other label, I suspect that “gaslighting” has been, is, and will be both mis- and over-applied. Even with the miasma of misconceptions or misuses that attach themselves to such potent linguistic tags, I don’t feel that I need to restrict my usage of “gaslighting” so much as responsibly focus the way I apply it. I can’t govern how other people are going to use the word, but I don’t believe I can properly comprehend my culture without using this term. And if we ever get to a time when almost nobody is using the term anymore, you can bet that I’ll be keeping a close watch on the lights. Just because nobody else acknowledges them dimming doesn’t mean I’m crazy for knowing what I can see. It means I need to be vigilant, because cruelty may prefer to operate in the dark, but it can be even more effective, sometimes, performing right out in the open.☕︎
Catecinem 