In a ‘golden age’ of 21st-Century Western drama, there also seems to be a gradual awakening: that this is a universal issue, affecting all generations, genders and backgrounds (though in the vast majority of cases, the victims are female and the perpetrators male), and that seemingly ‘subtle’ forms like gaslighting and coercive control are devastating in their effect. While it’s clearly a universal issue, US and UK drama depictions have had a massive mainstream impact on how it’s understood. Yet mainstream drama has a unique potential: to engage huge, diverse audiences through storytelling to portray what happens behind closed doors and to shape our awareness of domestic abuse. Ironically, the Hollywood remake tried to suppress its predecessor, by demanding that all prints be destroyed a profit-driven entertainment biz is rarely ‘moral’ at heart. The term actually stems from the above period thriller, itself based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, and a 1940 British film each of these versions presents an intense, intimate picture of domestic abuse, even while the subject was a general taboo.

‘Gaslighting’ – meaning psychological abuse, where the victim is led to doubt their own judgement (and sense of reality) through the abuser’s repeated denials, deflections and lies – is often treated as a modern buzzword, although it has appeared in decades of psychoanalytical studies. How vaginas are finally losing their stigma

We realise, before Paula does, that it is her husband creating these head-spinning disturbances in one scene, she entreats him: “Are you trying to tell me I’m insane?” Her husband retorts: “Now, perhaps you will understand why I cannot let you meet people.” We watch as Paula becomes increasingly isolated and disorientated, convinced by her husband that she is losing her mind: items disappear strange noises seep from a locked attic the gas-fuelled house lighting mysteriously fades and glowers. In her Oscar-winning performance in the 1944 movie Gaslight, Ingrid Bergman plays a young opera singer, Paula, traumatised by the death of the aunt who raised her, but swept into a whirlwind marriage to a charming musician (Charles Boyer).

Gaslight 1944 movie download