![]() ![]() The really important part of the movie is Bergman’s turn, once Boyer’s appalling scheme is revealed. There’s a reason the original play didn’t refer to gaslighting in the title. The irony of the writers is that they strongly suggest that these attitudes, ought to be an artifact of a past age, but are very much alive in the present day of 1944, as they are today. Nominally, the title, “Gaslight” hearkens to a past time, to suggest that this is all about something long ago. But it also builds on the idea that the man dominates the woman, and the whole show is a beautifully constructed critique of everything to do with these ideas. ![]() The story builds on the idea that a man – whatever man – who marries a woman becomes the head of the household by legal procedure and convention. Talk about losing the plot – the term recently popularized destroys all this proto-feminist brilliance for a mediocre and defeatist meme. ![]() The point however, is that she isn’t mad – and she always hangs on to the fragments of doubt that his stories seek to sow. Before the end of the film, and before the climactic scene, he is explicitly putting this in motion. His goal is to destabilize her so that he can have her certified insane. That’s why all her numerous inquiries are about lights below stairs.īoyer drives her mad because he’s the murderer of her aunt, has insinuated himself into her life to get access to the house where the goods that he tried to steal as part of the original murder are secreted. She would have no reason to expect that the gaslight dims because someone is in the attic, because the attic would have no gas. So the film depends on a plot convenience that serves the production design, but makes no sense. Again, factually, barely-visited attics would never have been gaslit – in fact, it would have been an incredible danger to do so. The article cited gets it right from a simple factual point of view: gas lighting systems would have dimmed when more lights were lit, in the same way that the shower gets hot when someone flushes the toilet.īut the article says that in order to cause Bergman to not connect the dimming lights with his rummaging in the attic, he has to drive her mad. I’ll take issue with the cited review article and this one by pointing out that Boyer does not necessarily, and most likely does not have, awareness of the phenomenon of the dimming gaslight. Those who’ve been on the receiving end of a vigorous gaslighting campaign? Readers who’ve yet to see the film may want to skip the below clip, as it does contain something close to a spoiler. The detail is so precise, so committed that every flicker crawls under the skin, projecting terrible uncertainty and fear to the audience. The heaviness of the atmosphere brings us even closer to Paula’s mental state, trapping us with her. In a column on production design for The Film Experience, critic Daniel Walber points out how Boyer destabilizes Bergman by fooling with their gas-powered lamps, and also how the film’s Academy Award-winning design team used the “constricting temporality” of a Victorian London lit by gas to set a foreboding mood:īetween the streetlights outside and the fixtures within, the mood is forever dimmed. (Cunning linguists that we are, had the film retained the play’s title, 2022 may well have found us complaining that some villain tried to Angel Street us…) In the same review, Crowther sniped that Gaslight was “a no more illuminating title” than Angel Street. Boyer doing the driving in his best dead-pan hypnotic style, while the flames flicker strangely in the gas-jets and the mood music bongs with heavy threats, it is no wonder that Miss Bergman goes to pieces in the most distressing way. We can at least slip the information that the study is wholly concerned with the obvious endeavors of a husband to drive his wife slowly mad. In his review, The New York Times’ film critic Bosley Crowther steered clear of spoilers, while musing that the bulk of the theater-going public was probably already hip to the central conceit, following the successful Broadway run of Angel Street, the Patrick Hamilton thriller on which the film was based: A teenaged Angela Lansbury made her big screen debut. Ingrid Bergman, playing opposite Charles Boyer, won an Academy award for her performance. “Gaslighting” is unavoidable these days, five years after it was named 2016’s “most useful” and “likely to succeed” word by the American Dialect Society.Īs long as we’re playing word games, are you familiar with “ denominalization”?Īlso known as “verbing” or “ verbification,” it’s the process whereby a noun is retooled as a verb. ![]()
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