There was another movie along similar lines. I saw only one clip with the explanation the director made the film a bit spooky by technique. A woman is speaking to her husband as he walks through their house. She is looking right at him as he passes behind an architectural pillar and in that split second another man emerges on the other side. The woman is startled by the change but deals with it as if natural because a lot of that sort of thing had been happening and she doesn't want to be taken for crazy.
In Gaslight, of course, the husband had been dimming the lights and maintaing nothing is changed. Like Ace, I've not seen the film but it's famous for its name and the cruel crime it describes.
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See, in the remake she buys a light meter.
Illuminating gas was once common and piped to city homes and street lamps. Made from coal, the gas only worked well because of residual hydrocarbons such as benzene (cf. the origin of the word "phenyl" which comes from the Greek word meaning "shining").
Electric lighting displaced illuminating gas and "coal gas" was then used mostly for heating and cooking--after homes were refitted. This in turn was displaced by natural gas in the 1960's in Britain. Natural gas is a poor light source as is propane which is why gas mantles are required in camping lanterns.
Propane you say.
Mantles are those little white socks that go inside? That don't actually burn?
Hang on.
Yeah. I saw those on keroscene karocene kirosene xxxxxx some other kind of cheap gas lanterns. Fascinating. I had no idea until then. And right after that fascinating discovery, and I mean RIGHT after that, I was distracted by the superseding fascination of hummingbirds. It's one thing after another up there in a cabin.
I mentioned one such trip so filled with discovery of the sort seen only in Colorado. The whole thing had me completely gripped. It had everything. Gold. Gold panning. Hiking around like indians. Beaver dam. Critters like marmots. Rams observable at treeline. A closed up gold mine with detritus dumped all around it. You can see the gold in the ore. Although very low grade. I asked, "why oh why isn't this ore smelted?" The answer, universal among them, "It's not worth the trouble. The value is too low. That's why the place was obtainable."
But that was then and this is now.
And now that guy is dead.
And when I mention this to the people who took me there, the dumb drunk bastards don't recall one single element. Such an outstanding trip, and schwing, right past their consciousness. It makes me ill just thinking about it again. Goddamnit, how can anyone much less everyone forget something so amazing as that? How? A fucking GOLD mine! Who does that? Who buys a goddamn gold mine? Larry Calson does, that's who. And now nobody even remembers. I could barf.
I think we are all being gaslighted these days. How else to explain these calamitous, insane times?
Gaslighting is different from Cardassian interrogation techniques, though. The "four lights" gag is straight-up High Stalinist practice - a technique to make the victim complicit in their oppression. If you can get your target to repeat your lies to you, you've broken them. Gaslighting, on the other hand, is more subtle, and doesn't involve straight-up coercion the way that "four lights" interrogation works. Vaclav Havel wrote about how this worked in the day-to-day - the way daily lies told to get along day-to-day made each citizen complicit in the web of lies that maintained the dictatorship.
Gaslighting operates on a basis of doubt and insecurity. "Four lights" operates through main force and shame.
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