Skip to main content

Review: Gaslight (1944)



Despite its varied forms or narratives, all Gothic fictions revolve on a fundamental contrast: that between the tenuous comfort of an isolated self and the dangerous fascination of an intrusive otherness. The Victorian is an age characterised by its obsession with the supernatural – poised on the verge of modernity, with scientific advancements like Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species inspired missions to unlock the myths of the natural world, people began to take notice of what lay outside their limited knowledge of things, of anything that is external to the closed domain of humanity. This curiosity for the unknown provoked an appraisal for the known – the immutable social system was revealed as hostile to the cultivation of individual minds, and time-honoured ethics such as that dictating a woman’s role in a traditional domesticity a menace to the preservation of personal integrity.

The negotiation between the old and the new, the internal and the external, is the dominant theme of Victorian literature. Freedom was a concept that had no longer a purely theoretical abstractness; its pent-up force sought outlet finally in the practical efforts of the few, exerting far-reaching impacts that would, in consequence, changed face of the social climate. Even for those to whom the prospect of freedom was not too implausible a dream, but altogether an unattainable privilege, their growing distrust with the old values and ideals that they used to hold dearly to triggered stirrings of rebelliousness against their secluded lives.

A typical Gothic fiction dramatises this struggle of attaining the freedom of self. Women are chiefly the voice, their stories a model for the oppressed to stand up against the injustice of their present conditions, or the tyranny that condemns their lives to endless fear and suffering. Passivity is no longer a mark of feminine virtue, but an impediment to one’s pursuit of future happiness and self-fulfillment. Instead of resigning to fruitless dreaming, those doughty women set out to rewrite their destiny.  

But not all women in those stories start in a place where their sense of resoluteness or intrepidity is readily evoked in the face of adversity, nor are they wholly aware of possessing those qualities. Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight features a heroine who is constantly questioning her own sanity. It is clear from the outset that her husband isn’t totally innocent in the matter: he reproaches her for her incessant forgetfulness and, later, a paranoiac hallucination which convinces her that the gaslight would inexplicably dim whenever he is out. The unravelling of the mystery seems too facile, with every obvious clue pointing to the husband as the cause of the wife’s affliction. He is callous and scornful during his wife’s many mental break-downs, flirting behind her back with the servant and slipping out every night to tend to an unknown personal business.

Intentionally or not, the play’s want of suspenseful elements heightens this uneasy complicity between the playwright and the audience, to the extent that, as the heroine’s suffering of her husband’s cruel treatment becomes increasingly acute, our collective moral conscience is called into question. This manipulation of audience’s response constitutes in the main the mechanism of filmmaking. A filmmaker is, in a sense, more of an interpreter than a storyteller, whose invisible presence thrusts more forcefully between an audience and the film. It seems normally the case that, when viewing a film, especially for the first time, one is allowed not much freedom in diverting from the fundamental perspective through which the story is told.

With George Cukor’s 1944 film adaptation of Gaslight the viewers are subjected to an emotional trial that sees Ingrid Bergman’s Paula Alquit systematically driven mad by her wicked husband Gregory, played by Charles Boyer. Both were acting against their types: Bergman reduced to a crumbling frailty that was oddly efficacious with someone whose tall, robust frame, and whose faultlessly dignified mien, earned her roles in the past of a more fearless, dogged temperament (in fact it was Cukor’s intention that the character should seem in appearance contrary to the tortured victim she then becomes); whilst Boyer swiveled between his signature lover’s charm and a shuddering viciousness.

What ultimately distinguishes Gaslight from other Gothic thrillers of the period is the timelessness of its subject - that our greatest fear derives not from the threat of what we don’t know, but the unsuspected danger inherent in what we know. Gaslight is a perfect metaphor for this: it consists in both light and darkness, offering at most temporary, tentative relief that is constantly accompanied by signs of its imminent extinction.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Paintings in Proust: Vesuvius Erupting by J.M.W. Turner

In Proust’s Swann’s Way , the narrator’s grandmother is described as one who inculcates in her grandson a reverence for the “elevated ideals.” Infinitely disdainful of the mechanical nature of replica, when shown photograph of the magnificent Mount Vesuvius his grandmother dismisses it with a lofty query as of whether other more acknowledged artists did paintings of the volcano in the first place. She is having in mind the great J.M.W. Turner, whose depiction of Vesuvius in flame displays, in her view, “a stage higher in the scale of art.” The enduring fascination with volcanoes was especially evident in the 19 th century, which saw an irregularly high frequency of Vesuvius eruptions that, at the time, alarmed many of the imminent cataclysm that a thousand of years before destroyed the city of Pompeii. Turner, according to a number of sources, may not be amongst the first-hand witnesses of those eruptions, but badgered his geologist friends, John MacCulloch and Charles Stoke

Franz von Stuck, Two Dancers

Dancers can be like jousters. Fear and excitement wring their hearts so into tangled skein. Fluttered air brushes against their skins like chill. In anticipation of a good, likely interminable, fight both cannot be more well-prepared, grimacing to each other some distances afar as menacing demonstration of their unconquerable audacities. Everything is all so punctiliously rehearsed and choreographed. Even when darkness descends and everything is shrouded in utter invisibility, each dancer will know by heart when to put which foot forward, to which direction she will sway elegantly her supple bodice to duck narrowly from her opponent, and when the time is ripe, she will let her skirt billow like an arch of rainbow, the more fiery and colourful the rainbow the likelier the chance the dancer is going to claim the final victory. It is always something with Art Nouveau that, when beholding a piece that epitomises most substantially the essence of the said art mov

Review: La Jetee (1962)

In Matter and Memory , French philosopher Henri Bergson posits an implausible notion – the pure present: “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Since time is a movement , an unending progression, there is not a definite point as that of a present moment, Bergson seems to suggest, but an admixture of the past and the future, the has-beens rapidly encroaching on, and eventually subsuming, the what-ifs. In a sense, and as absurd as this may sound, the present is ever elusive to our consciousness: what we perceive of the now , at the very moment in which it is being registered, is already relegated to the realm of the past. The past seems, therefore, the only reality we have really experienced; the reality that we are predestined to never possess. Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) envisages a future in which man finally discovers the means of triumphing over time’s irrevocable logic: experiments are