*As part of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, we’re looking back at the origins of the term ‘gaslighting’ and how it impacts the work we do with domestic violence survivors
In 1944, the film production company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released a movie that quickly captivated critics and casual movie-goers alike. The movie, which featured two of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the time; Ingrid Bergman (of Casablanca fame) and Charles Boyer, would go on to receive seven nominations at the 17th Academy Awards, winning two (including Best Actress for Bergman).
Today, the movie is featured on IMDB’s list of the 25 best film noir movies of all time, which is rather appropriate considering it also marks the screen debut of legendary Murder, She Wrote star Angela Lansbury. Perhaps most notable of all, however, is the movie’s title, a simple yet evocative phrase which has since become a key factor by which we define emotional manipulation and abuse in a relationship.
The movie was called Gaslight.
Ahead of its Time
Directed by George Cukor, Gaslight is based off a 1938 stage play written by English playwright Patrick Hamilton (the play is titled Gas Light). The movie centers on a young woman named Paula Alquist (Bergman) who is sent away from her London home to live in Italy after her world-famous opera singer aunt, whom she’d been staying with, is 
murdered. While there, she meets and begins a whirlwind romance with a handsome pianist named Gregory Anton (Boyer), agreeing to marry him after a quick two-week courtship and moving back to London so they can take up residence in the house she once shared with her aunt.
At first, Gregory appears sympathetic to the lingering trauma Paula carries from her aunt’s murder, and he even promises to have all her aunt’s possessions sealed away and boarded up in their attic to help Paula move on. However, Gregory soon begins to routinely chide Paula for her forgetfulness and paranoia, claiming that she keeps misplacing possessions and remembering things that didn’t happen. Gregory keeps Paula isolated in their house, telling friends and neighbors that she’s sick, and not only does he turn their house maid Nancy (Lansbury) against Paula by claiming that his wife is difficult and high-strung, he also openly flirts with Nancy in front of Paula to set her further on edge.
The film’s title stems from its late 1800’s setting when homes were still mostly lit by gaslight lamps. Because of how gas was fed through a house’s lamp pipes to provide light, when one lamp was turned up, another lamp in the house would often dim as a result. This phenomenon inspires a recurring scene in the film where Paula is kept up at night by the sounds of heavy footsteps and the dimming of the lamp in her bedroom even though she’s supposedly alone in the house.
Invisible Wounds
Of course, it’s eventually revealed that Gregory was behind all of Paula’s supposed moments of “forgetfulness.” As part of an insidious plan to have Paula committed to a mental hospital so he could freely access her aunt’s vast estate, viewers discover that Gregory had staged a series of incidents designed to make her question her own reality and, consequently, become more and more dependent on him.
In an ironic twist, the heavy footsteps and dimming gaslight lamp that keep Paula awake at night aren’t even an intentional part of Gregory’s plan to terrorize her. They’re simply him being carelessly loud and turning up the lamp in the attic as he spends each evening sneaking into their house attic through the skylight and rummaging around in search of valuables that Paula’s aunt left behind.
Even though the distress inflicted on Paula by the movie’s namesake isn’t intentional on Gregory’s part, it still factors in to such a degree that it would eventually become a colloquialism all its own: gaslighting. Today, the term is used to define a situation where one person manipulates another into questioning their perception or recollection of a situation, often as a means of control.
The phrase “gaslighting” is never actually used in Gaslight the movie, but the behavior Gregory exhibits is a textbook example of what we now mean when we list gaslighting as a form of abusive control. While the phrase occasionally appeared in media and texts from the 1950’s onward, it wasn’t until the early 2000’s that gaslighting entered the mainstream lexicon, largely thanks to works like the 2007 book The Gaslight Effect from Dr. Robin Stern, Associate Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.
Patterns of Control
When most people hear the term domestic abuse, the first thing they often picture in their mind is physical violence. However, Gaslight serves as a stark reminder that the harm a survivor can endure isn’t always physical.
Throughout the entirety of the movie, Gregory never hits or physically threatens Paula, but the abuse and trauma he inflicts on her is still palpable enough to drive her into hysterical fits and make her tacitly agree with whatever accusations he throws at her just so he’ll stop. Her behavior becomes odd and erratic, and of course Gregory just uses her understandably distressed reactions as further proof that she’s unfit to watch after herself.
While our cultural understanding of domestic abuse has naturally evolved in the decades since Gaslight’s original release, the movie is still shockingly prescient in its portrayal of coercive control tactics. As part of our REACH advocacy training, we learn about the ‘Wave of Abuse’ model (also often referred to as the ‘Cycle of Abuse’), a methodology for tracking how an abusive relationship often progresses. The stages outlined in the Wave of Abuse include:
- The Honeymoon Period – Early days when the abuser often showers their partner with affection (sometimes referred to as “love bombing”)
- Tension Building – The abuser starts displaying problematic behavior (jealousy, impatience, irritability, etc.) while their partner feels more and more like they’re “walking on eggshells” to avoid conflict
- Explosive Incident – The abuser lashes out in one or more ways, perhaps physically or perhaps simply by yelling or verbally berating their partner
- Hearts & Flowers – The abuser displays deep remorse, becoming apologetic and promising to change or that “it will never happen again”
- Same Old Stuff – A status quo of normalcy is established until eventually the tension starts to build back up and the wave repeats itself
Watching Gaslight, we can see in real-time as Paula and Gregory’s relationship advances through all the above stages. There’s even an early scene in the film where, after Gregory proposes marriage, Paula decides to take a week-long trip by herself to mull over her decision. Only when she reaches her destination, she’s greeted by none other than Gregory who followed her under the pretense of not being able to bear even a single day without her. Paula interprets this behavior as a grand romantic gesture (and reacts in kind), but later the viewer realizes it was just another carefully calculated part of Gregory’s plan to manipulate and control her.
It’s important to recognize that Gaslight is still a work of fiction, and that in some regards it attempts to oversimplify what is in fact a very complex issue (obviously not every emotional abuser is enacting a plan to access the fortune of their partner’s rich dead aunt). However, it does still deserve credit for showing how emotional and psychological abuse can be just as harmful as physical abuse. This is especially important in the wake of substantial new Massachusetts legislation regarding coercive control which was signed into law back in June of this year, making it so that abuse victims can now file for restraining orders even if there are no signs of physical violence.
Anyone who wants to better understand the behavior of gaslighting and the degree to which emotional abuse can affect a survivor’s well-being should watch Gaslight (that and it’s also just a genuinely good movie). The film’s title may only be tangentially related to the abusive behavior it spotlights, but it still helps to provide clear definitions and use cases to a pattern of abusive behavior that’s often regarded as murky and hard to prove.
