![]() People who experience gaslighting will feel confused, anxious, or as though they cannot trust themselves, exactly as Ingrid Bergman portrays in this movie. And this is, to quote the film's period poster: (the) strange drama of a captive sweetheart! To serve it its proper definition and coinage, gaslighting proper is a form of psychological abuse in which a person or group causes someone to question their own sanity, memories, or perception of reality. While an engaging and massively popular item of historical drama, Gaslight (1944) is probably most remarkable as a cultural point of reference for the denominalisation of its title - to become the term 'gaslighting' - an aspect of psychological abuse generally within couples such as this - an abusive and controlling male. The gaslights that dim whenever he leaves the house for work? He’s actually been going into the attic to search for the jewels, and when he turns the lights on there, the rest of the house’s power dims.Gaslight (1944) is an historical psychological and ever topical film noir drama by George Cukor, starring Ingrid Bergman, and based on a play by writer Patrick Hamilton. Her husband is – spoiler alert – the man who murdered her aunt years earlier, in pursuit of her precious jewels, and he is now trying to drive Paula out of the house and into an asylum so he can continue his search for the gems. Just as Paula reaches breaking point, a detective turns up to convince her otherwise. As Paula grows more and more distressed, he twists that against her, too – “Paula you silly child” “Paula, stop being hysterical” “Please control yourself” – until even she is convinced that she is losing her mind. He openly flirts with the maid (Angela Lansbury in her film debut), and turns her against his wife. “I hope you’re not starting to imagine things again,” he says with faux concern, using her supposedly troubled mind as an excuse to bar her from seeing any visitors or leaving the house. He starts removing more objects from around the house and accusing her of hiding them. He gives his wife a precious brooch, only to trick her into thinking she’s lost it. Funnily enough, the “gaslight” of the title was not the method of manipulation, but a vital clue to its discovery.īergman plays Paula, a young woman whose new husband Gregory (French-American actor Charles Boyer) begins a campaign of abuse against her. ![]() The thriller, which won Bergman an Oscar for Best Actress, was adapted from a 1938 play of the same name by Patrick Hamilton, an English novelist and playwright who also wrote the source material for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. ![]() The term refers to a very particular and insidious kind of abuse – the kind where a person is deliberately manipulated into questioning their own sanity. Now, Merriam Webster has chosen it as its word of the year for 2022. ![]() “You’re slowly and systematically being driven out of your mind.” Seventy-eight years later, the term “ gaslighting” has been used in a published High Court judgement for the first time ever, after a woman’s abusive partner gradually convinced her she had bipolar disorder. You’re not going out of your mind,” a detective tells Ingrid Bergman’s Paula in the climactic moments of the 1944 film Gaslight.
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