This editorial contains spoilers.
“You’re not going out of your mind. You’re slowly and systematically being driven out of your mind.” – Gaslight (1944)
It’s one of the oldest tropes in the book of psychological horror: something unusual/terrible happens; female protagonist gets caught in the crossfire and blamed for it; no one believes said woman and thinks she’s crazy; we, the audience, can see she’s telling the truth and know she should be believed; woman eventually is vindicated or she wins our empathy, at the very least. In the mean time, something, someone, or a pocket of society is actually pulling the strings and the wool over her eyes through cruel mind games, manipulating, policing, abusing, and surveying her mind and body, as she fights that much harder to prove that no, she’s not “crazy”— she’s just being gaslighted.
And, for decades, horror has taken major issue with these unfortunate, all-too-real depictions of women being thrown under the bus for the sake of others wishing to control their lives— as we’ve watched a dizzying amount of films within the genre that demand us to stand by a female character’s side as she’s being whiplashed and betrayed from those surrounding her. Coming from both versions of the aforementioned Gaslight (1940 and its 1944 remake) and the 1938 play that proceeded them, the term “gaslighting” originated out of scenes in which the conniving husband lights up the gas lamps throughout the house— to which the unknowing wife comments on their suspicious dimming— as he denies it and tells her she’s just imaging things, in order to make her believe she’s going insane. In the non-cinematic world, we may have gotten better with believing women and relinquishing as much control over them since the inception of this coined term, however, this subgenre never loses relevancy because there will always be the few who don’t. And, some eighty years later, portrayals of gaslighted women remain just as resonant with audiences as ever— most notably with the success of the latest entry within this subgenre, The Invisible Man.
Admittedly, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Leigh Whannell’s updated-for-2020 The Invisible Man shares more commonalities with Hitchcock’s Suspicion and elements of The Shining than it even does with the original Universal Classic Monsters movies that it was cut from the cloth of. Recognizing that there is little scarier than a woman escaping a monstrous partner who then begins to hide in plain sight as he stalks her and her loved ones, Whannell utilizes every frame to convey a sense of surveillance for Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) as her toxic relationship morphs from one kind of hell to a slightly different kind of hell after her ex’s alleged “death.”
Cecilia is so burdened by her trauma that she becomes borderline agoraphobic after leaving Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and moving in with her friend James (Aldis Hodge). However, she can temporarily breathe a sigh of relief, as news reports claim that Adrian has died by suicide— no longer alive to ruin her life…or so she thinks. According to Cecilia, during their relationship, Adrian was in complete control of how she looked, what she wore, what she ate, when she left the house, and what she said and thought. She confesses that Adrian would physically hurt her and that the only thing she had agency over was her decision to secretly take birth control, because she didn’t want to bear a child with him. As one would expect from a narcissist like this, he would eventually hang this over Cecilia’s head.
Like a typical gaslighter, Adrian aka The Invisible Man (initially) only messes with Cecilia when no one else is around to make her feel as if she’s imagining everything. She begins to feel a presence lurking throughout the house, and she knows it’s him— in some form, omnipresent— even when everyone else around her has doubts. Petty things like interrupting a sleeping sequence with a swift pull of a bed sheet when she’s the only one awake, or stealing her architectural portfolio and sabotaging her job interview, eventually progress to more sinister “paybacks” like quietly drugging her with drowsy medication that weakens her physicality and, horrifyingly, raping her in her sleep so he could impregnate her. Just as he did before she left him, master manipulator Adrian resorts to controlling Cecilia’s body as if he reserves any right to do so.
Cecilia’s support system of James, his daughter, and her sister Emily (Harriet Dyer) may mean well, but they too fail her when they neglect to believe her and abandon her when she needs them the most. With the best intentions, James insists, “Adrian will haunt you if you let him,” which, by all accounts, is a sympathetic response to Cecilia’s growing paranoia. But still, he isn’t fully listening to her. After an incident at the house in which Adrian has framed her of something she didn’t do, James leaves her alone in the house, and it nearly costs Cecilia her life. And when Adrian sends a hateful email to Emily from Cecilia’s account, she completely writes Cecilia off before she can even defend herself properly. Sure, believing that an invisible man is ruining her life may be a lot to ask of her sister, but doesn’t she deserve to be taken seriously? Hasn’t she already been through enough?
As Adrian would eventually say to Cecilia’s face, instead of hurting her, he’ll hurt the people she loves instead, so she will be blamed…and he means it. Right when Cecilia has summoned definitive proof that Adrian is behind all of this and gains Emily as an ally again, Adrian frames Cecilia for Emily’s public throat slashing. And he wins yet again: Cecilia gets stuck inside a psychiatric ward, ignored, sedated, left alone with him in the room, and still, not believed. However, she’s not giving up quite yet. Adrian may have the upper hand, but there’s one thing Cecilia has that he does not: “He needs you because you don’t need him,” his brother promises to her.
It’s not until the film’s closure that Cecilia herself receives closure. This is just what he does, she insists: he makes her feel like the crazy one. So, she capitalizes on no one believing her and transforms into the quasi-gaslighter herself. She meets up with the visible and very-much-alive Adrian, who refuses to admit anything, as he attempts to charm and con his way into Cecilia’s psyche one last time: “I know you feel like you’re going insane, (read: because I made you feel that way) but I’m the only one who can help you.” Cecilia doesn’t quiver, and for the first time, she holds the power— as she dons Adrian’s invisible suit and slices his throat to frame as his suicide. Surprise.
One viewing of The Invisible Man immediately brings another recent gaslighting horror to mind, 2018’s timely Unsane. Similar to Cecilia’s circumstances, Unsane follows protagonist Sawyer (Claire Foy) as she uproots her life from one part of the country to another to avoid a male stalker. Feeling depressed and anxious that he will find her, she checks herself into a therapy session at a clinic that tricks her into signing to confinement. Her experience only worsens when she swears that one of the clinic’s employees is, in fact, her stalker. Naturally, the alleged stalker denies her claims, while mostly everyone at the clinic calls her crazy and fails to take her assertions seriously, all while feeding her meds that she doesn’t even need.
And the parallels to Invisible don’t end there. As a frustrated Sawyer is gaslighted and held against her will for days, she receives sedation when she’s trying to tell the truth, as the employee finally acknowledges his true identity (but, true-to-trope, only when nobody else is looking.) He kidnaps her, kills several of her loved ones, and she eventually escapes— but never unscathed. The film implies she’s so mentally traumatized that, even after he’s dead, she continues to visualize him everywhere she goes. Even a series of flashbacks is infuriating, as a detective encourages her to change her lifestyle and live in fear in order to get away from this stalker. But shouldn’t this maniac be the one forced to live his life in isolation and punishment? Why must it be the other way around? Unsane not only looks at gaslighting on a smaller, intimate scale through Sawyer’s relationship to her stalker— it also widens the net to comment on health insurance scams and mental illness exploitation as well.
Of course, contemporary gaslighting horrors were built upon the backs of those that came before them: the quintessential Gaslight (discussing the ‘44 version) and the exemplary Rosemary’s Baby (1968), which Invisible derives snippets of in varying ways. Both follow naïve (yet intuitive) wives of handsome husbands that are lying to them, scheming against them, and using them for their own personal gains. In Gaslight, Paula (Ingrid Bergman) is accused of lying, stealing, and cheating by her husband (none of which is true) as he isolates her and tells her that she’s just “imagining things.” Paula begins to question her own sanity through his omissions of truth— all because he wants to have her institutionalized. In Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary (Mia Farrow) is not only gaslighted by her husband Guy (John Cassavetes) but also by her suspiciously eager community of neighbors and doctors. Similar to Cecilia’s life with Adrian, Rosemary’s diet and appearance are policed by others, as she’s forced to drink concoctions she hates and is made to feel insecure about her haircut. Her doctor enforces her to not read books nor listen to her friends’ advice. Her rocky pregnancy pains are quickly dismissed, and she’s threatened to be taken to a “mental hospital” when she correctly suspects these people of witchcraft.
The shared through line between Invisible and Baby is that both Cecilia and Rosemary are used by others to bear children. Like Adrian did to Cecilia, Rosemary’s husband Guy exploits Rosemary’s body by allowing his wife to be raped in her sleep for impregnation. Rosemary may have wanted this baby, unlike Cecilia— but never in this way. Guy and the community use Rosemary’s baby to bring in Year One of Satan, while Adrian wants to use Cecilia’s pregnancy to manipulate her into going back to him.
While all of these films cause infuriation by what we, as the audience, know who is to be believed and who is not, they sometimes offer some sense of accountability. Both Invisible and Unsane give the women the opportunity to kill off their gaslighters. Invisible allows Cecilia to take matters into her own hands and suggests she’ll either destroy Adrian’s suit or use it for good in the future, while Unsane allows Sawyer to return to her life before her stalker infiltrated it. Gaslight allows for some light revenge from Paula unto her husband as he’s arrested. Perhaps on-screen scenarios like these give real women hope that their gaslighters too will be held accountable for their actions, or, at the very least, allow more women to speak up and revel in the fact that they will, one day, finally get to say: I told you so.
The Invisible Man may not necessarily bring anything new to the table in terms of the duplicitousness-against-women subgenre, but that’s not really the point. Experts have suggested that women have long been conditioned to crave relationships and connection that puts them in particularly vulnerable positions for exploitation and gaslighting, therefore victim blaming, domestic/sexual abuse, stalking, manipulation, and gaslighting against women may never cease to exist— and the horror genre simply refuses to shut up about it. The more these stories get filtered into the genre subconscious, the more awareness they bring— and the more poignant films we will continue to get in their wake.
