My partner told me that she’d never seen the film Gaslight. I told her that she definitely had. –Zoe Coombs Marr
Eighty years ago, George Cukor’s Gaslight was released. A noir masterpiece, it swept the Oscars and coined a term that’s used far and wide today. You need only check in with the armchair psychologists on TikTok to see the rampant use of the word to describe any kind of dysfunctional relationship, whether husband-wife, parent-child, doctor-patient, candidate-voter.
The relationship at the center of Cukor’s Gaslight is between Paula and Gregory, played by Ingrid Berman and Charles Boyer. Paula is a vulnerable young woman who was traumatized as a child by her aunt’s still unsolved murder. While living abroad, she’s swept off her feet by Gregory, who immediately trundles her back to London and into her aunt’s long-vacant townhouse.
The honeymoon is barely over before Gregory starts gently reminding her of matters she’s supposedly forgotten or items she’s supposedly misplaced. At first he behaves like a worried but loving husband, but increasingly he hounds and harasses her about her mental state until she no longer trusts her own perception of reality.
During the evenings, when Gregory goes out to “work,” Paula notices the gaslight in her room flicker and dim, something that normally happens only when another light in the house is turned on. Because no one else is there to do it, she starts to fear that she’s seeing things. The truth is that Gregory didn’t go out; he’s in the attic, and he turns on the light there to search for the dead aunt’s jewels.
A common misapprehension among people who haven’t watched the film recently is that Gregory is deliberately dimming the lights to drive her mad, but, no, it’s simply an unintended but lucky consequence of his time in the attic––lucky because the flickering gaslight is what finally pushes Paula into madness.
Spoiler: It was Gregory who murdered the aunt all those years ago. He married Paula in a long game to get his paws on her jewels, but thanks to master detective Joseph Cotton, his scam is exposed and Paula is restored to sanity.
It’s testament to the power and reach of the film that the term “gaslight” quickly became part of our lexicon. Defined as emotional abuse aimed at making someone doubt their own grip on reality, the expression is widely used today in psychological analyses, political debates, and of course, crime novels.
Gaslighting is at the forefront in my new novel, Shell Games. In a nutshell (see what I did there?), a wealthy woman of a certain age calls the police in hysterics to report that her new husband just confessed to a notorious unsolved crime from decades before––a confession he denies having made, and a crime the FBI quickly says he couldn’t possibly have committed.
Did he actually confess to it, and if so, why? If not, why does she think he did? Does she have dementia? Or is he gaslighting her to get control of her fortune? Or is he gaslighting her daughter to get her to believe her mother has dementia? Or is someone else gaslighting the daughter? Who? And about what? And finally, is her mother gaslighting all of them? Shell Games is all about mind games and emotional manipulation. It’s gaslighting on steroids.
Consider these other examples of gaslighting in crime fiction, but be forewarned: spoilers abound.
The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins. Rachel’s ex-husband Tom was gaslighting her all through their marriage and continuing after their divorce. He encouraged her alcohol abuse, then convinced her that she did things while so drunk she can’t remember doing them.
Before I go to Sleep, by S.J. Watson. Christine is an amnesiac as a result of an injury that her husband Ben tells her was caused by an accident. The amnesia makes her entirely dependent on Ben, who tells her everything about who she is and their life together, and because he isolates her from the rest of the world, she’s convinced it’s all true. Turns out he’s the one who caused her injury.
The Therapist, by B.A. Paris. Alice and Leo move into a house where a murder once occurred. Strange incidents begin to happen around the house. Items are displaced, and at night Alice feels that someone is watching her. She imagines she’s being haunted, or stalked, and she convinces herself that she can’t trust Leo or any of her new neighbors. Someone is gaslighting Alice, and the mystery is who among the large cast of characters it is.
And finally, Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, a novel that may well be as genre-defining as Cukor’s film. Gaslighting is a two-way street inside the toxic marriage of Amy and Nick. Among the many instances: (1) As part of her plan to disappear and frame Nick for her murder, Amy constructs a fictitious diary as a way of controlling everyone’s perceptions of her, so that they see her as a loving wife and innocent victim of an abusive husband. (2) But Nick then gaslights Amy with his public avowals of how much he loves her and longs to get her back, causing Amy to doubt her own perception of their marriage and leading her to absolve Nick of her murder and return home to him.
Fair to say that eighty years after Cukor’s film masterpiece, gaslighting as a plot device in crime fiction not only survives––it thrives.
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