Seed & Spark: Gaslighting, Demonic Possession, and the Unreliable Female Brain

This is a guest post by Elizabeth Brooks

I love a good psychological thriller, especially if it involves insanity. The fear that I might be insane, that my perception might be warped, that instead of calmly walking to the bus stop, I am actually muttering to myself (scraping my clawed fingers along the yellow wallpaper) is a driving force in my creative process. The boundary between perception and reality is fertile ground for filmmaking, but I wonder why it’s always women whose brains get warped or permeated? I know our lady parts are conduits to Satan, and old Hollywood liked us vulnerable and prone to hysteria… But are we really getting tricked all the time, or is there a feminist edge to the gaslight thriller?

Gaslighting is a psychological term that actually comes from cinema. In the 1944 film Gaslight, an evil husband convinces Ingrid Bergman that she’s losing her mind, so he can steal her inherited jewels. (That film was based on an earlier film and a play before that, but let’s give the credit to Ingrid B. because she made it glamorous). Gaslighting is a form of manipulation and abuse where the victim’s sanity is questioned, and they are made to doubt their perception of reality. In real life, the use of gaslighting to undermine a victim is the terrain of deranged psychopaths and sociopaths, but like a lot of twisted stuff, it makes a great film plot.

 

Take, for example, The Innocents from 1961. Miss Giddens, a blonde and naïve nanny accepts a job to care for orphans at a creepy English estate. The children behave strangely, and we’re not sure if Miss Giddens is insane or if ghosts have possessed the little ones (spoiler: the kids are possessed). Gaslighting creates unstable narration, a protagonist who doesn’t trust her own brain. The trick works best when it catches the audience. We see through the eyes of the heroine, and it makes us paranoid: Is she crazy? Am I crazy? The tension delights us.

 

In the classic film Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary Woodhouse is paranoid about her pregnancy pain, her neighbor’s herbal remedies and her husband’s secret plotting. The trick to good gaslighting is to hover on the edge of normalcy, to implicate the audience in the character’s insanity. But, like Miss Giddens, Rosemary was right to be paranoid. She had been raped by the devil and was carrying his child.

 

What I’m trying to say is that classic cinema is really hostile towards women, constantly questioning their ability to perceive reality, calling up the old “hysterical women” stereotype. These women, though, aren’t crazy. They live in fucked-up supernatural worlds. In that sense, a film like The Innocents actually affirms its female characters: Miss Giddens is a capable detective, in spite of her swooning and fainting.

Magic Magic, the best film you didn’t see in 2013, plays on some of the traditional gaslighting structures, but takes them in new directions. (You didn’t see the film because Sony got pissed that it wasn’t an out-of-the-box horror thriller and chose not to release it). Like The Innocents, it stars a young blonde, Alicia (Juno Temple), in the creepy and isolated environment of a vacation cottage on an island in Southern Chile. Her companions are hostile strangers, friends of a cousin who mysteriously left the group and returned to the city. The camera lingers in mirrors and paranoia blossoms.

Michael Cera’s character, Brink, relentlessly hits on Alicia in deranged and unsettling ways, one of them involving a dead parrot. Alicia retaliates by pussificating him, i.e. suffocating him in her crotch, but it’s not really her who’s doing it—she is in some kind of a hypnotic trance. The film hovers on the edge of sanity, builds layers of unreality, but it doesn’t reveal and redeem. Magic Magic ends with a sharp turn; instead of affirming good female detective work, it doubles back and eats its tail. I won’t say more because I want you to see the film, but it’s a real creeper.

Gaslighting isn’t inherently gendered. It’s just that our culture prefers watching a woman on the brink. Weird films, art films and experimental cinema have been writing weak-minded men for decades. My favorite example of a man in the gaslight is Possession, a 1981 French horror film by Andrzej Zulawski.

 

The basic plot is that this guy, Mark, comes back from a sketchy business trip (briefcases stuffed with cash) and notices that his wife Anna is acting really strange. She tells him that she wants a divorce and then she moves out. He hires a private investigator to follow her, and reality starts to shimmer like the tarmac on a hot day. Actors play multiple characters. Dialog becomes disjointed. Turn a corner, and you’re back where you started. We’re not sure if we’re inside Mark’s paranoid mind.

It’s hard to say that Possession is a true feminist film because it does turn out that Anna is having lots of sex with a demon/alien and she pukes extraordinary amounts of green, slimy bile in a subway station…but at least it’s Mark who gets confused. And Anna and the alien do win in the end, though it’s hard to say if she wins or if the alien devours her completely like it does Charlize Theron in The Astronaut’s Wife.

Given these examples, one might conclude that men can gaslight women, but only aliens can gaslight men. I say: stay hopeful, female fans of the supernatural thriller. One of these days, the women will overpower the aliens.

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Elizabeth Brooks is the director of Kibuki: Spirits in Zanzibar. She is a mixed media artist and a member of the San Francisco experimental cinema community. Her work explores the boundary between fact and fiction, using film, video, writing, and sound to blur the line between memory and imagination. She holds an MA in African Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and an MFA in Photographic and Electronic Media from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She was a 2010 recipient of a Fulbright grant to Tanzania. She currently works as the Youth Curriculum Manager at the San Francisco Film Society, and her bilingual children’s book, Mama Has a Job, was recently selected for publication by Mkuki na Nyota publishers in Tanzania.