THE GASLIGHTING DOESN’T STOP
First published in the Philadelphia Association newsletter, July 2018, following a screening of Gaslight at the association centre in Hampstead.
But there was also something uncertain and jittery about the group’s relief and its confidence that gaslighting could be overcome. As the discussion went on, I started to think about jarring moments in the film. There were the two creepy kisses shared by the soon-to-be-married couple—what did Paula ever see in this slimy man? There were those grandiosely lit close-ups of Paula at her most miserable which seemed to exude some secret delight in martyrdom. There was the fickle housekeeper, so curiously ready to do the bidding of the American detective: she quickly switches loyalty from the master of the house to the curiously well-connected copper, perhaps because she instantly recognises a new master. When at the end the policeman, Paula’s rescuer, waits for her on the roof, there is an uncanny implication that the story might be starting all over again from the beginning—that Paula has found a new vampiric overlord too, and it is only for this reason that she has been able to renounce his predecessor.
These were very suspicious hunches. Maybe they even verged on a paranoid reading of the film, but still they raised the possibility that the gaslighting didn’t stop with Gregory’s capture—and maybe the audience that evening was jumpy because this horrible idea was in the air, but nobody wanted to bring it out into the open.
I once heard a radio interview with an activist woman who had been duped into a relationship by an undercover policeman. They had a child together and all the while he was filing surveillance reports. When the story eventually broke years later, the woman contacted her former lover to ask for his side of the story. She said he stonewalled her on the phone; he sounded as though he had taken legal advice in expectation of hearing from her, or as if he was still under orders. The interview conveyed a wrenching sense not only of betrayal but of an untrustworthiness which never ends. I remembered this interview a day or two after the Gaslight screening because I suddenly suspected that the film had gaslighted us all in that audience about class.
In a Scotland Yard scene early in the film the American calls over a tall constable and asks him if he would like to move his beat from the seedy East End to somewhere posher. Of course the constable agrees, and in his new territory he carefully follows his orders to worm his way into the affections of the housemaid Nancy, played with such delicious dislikeability and commonness by the young Angela Lansbury. (Known affectionately to all because of Murder, She Wrote but what a mesmerising, menacing actress she could be—watch The Manchurian Candidate!) The housemaid likes the constable, she seems to trust him; nothing suggests she knows he is a spy. Nancy has none of the hypnotic pathos and glamour of wretched, lovely Paula so it is easy not to notice at first that she, Nancy, has been gaslighted too. It is only possible to believe in Gaslight’s happy ending if both the hints of masochism and Nancy’s inconspicuous plight are ignored.