A woman’s sanity is undercut by her conniving husband, who misplaces objects—a brooch, a painting, a letter—in an attempt to make her believe she is mad so that he ultimately can send her to an asylum. Eventually his plan is revealed: he had murdered her aunt when the woman was a child and orchestrated their whirlwind romance years later in order to return to the house to locate some missing jewels. Nightly, Gregory—played by a silky, charismatic Charles Boyer—ventures into their attic, unbeknownst to her, to search for them. The eponymous gaslights are one of the many reasons the heroine believes herself to be truly going mad—they dim as if the gas has been turned on elsewhere in the house, even when, it would seem, no one has done so.
Bergman’s Paula is in a terrible, double-edged tumble: as she becomes convinced she is forgetful, fragile, then insane, her instability increases. Everything she is, is unmade by psychological violence: she is radiant, then hysterical, then utterly haunted. By the end she is a mere husk, floating around her opulent London residence like a specter. He doesn’t lock her in her room or in the house. He doesn’t have to. He turns her mind into a prison.
Watching the film, you feel for Paula, even though she is not real: her suffering is captured in celluloid’s carbonite. You watch it over and over again in the dark: admiring the eerie shots of their respective shadows against the fanciful Victorian furniture and decor, pausing over her defeated expressions, her swooning, her dewy, trembling mouth.
Ingrid Bergman is a mountain of a woman, tall and robust, but in this movie she is worn down like a sand dune. Gregory makes her break down in public, during a concert; later, he does so in their home, with only their two maids as witnesses. No audience is too small for her debasement. “Don’t humiliate me in front of the servants,” Paula sobs. But even if they hadn’t come in and seen what they’d seen, we would have. She might as well have said, “Don’t humiliate me in front of the audience.” Because either way, we—servants, viewers—are witnesses without power.
People who have never seen Gaslight, or who have only read secondhand descriptions of it, often say that Gregory’s entire purpose—the reason he “makes the lamps flicker”—is to drive Paula mad, as though that is the sum of his desires. This is probably one of the most misunderstood aspects of the story. In fact, Gregory has an extremely comprehensible motivation for his actions—the need to search for the jewels unimpeded by Paula’s presence. The flickering gas lamps are a side effect of that pursuit, and even his deliberate madness-inducing machinations are directed to this very sensible end. And yet, there is an unmistakable air of enjoyment behind his manipulation. You can plainly see the microexpressions flit across his face as he improvises, torments, schemes. He enjoys it and it serves him, and he is twice satisfied.
This is all to say, his motivations are not unexplainable. They are, in fact, aggravatingly practical—driven by greed, augmented by a desire for control, shot through with a cat’s instinct for toying with its prey. A reminder, perhaps, that abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something, and not care how they get it.
Dream House as Cycle
Cukor was known to torment his actresses to get “real” performances out of them. One biographer wrote that Cukor “seemed almost to revel in taking [Judy] Garland to the brink for scenes where she had to bare her emotions…. [He would remind her] of her own joyless childhood … and career low points, her marital failures … and chronic insecurity.” The makeup artist from A Star Is Born said, “He knew how to hurt a woman, and he used it several times to get them into a mood for a crying scene.” While shooting an iconic scene in which Garland’s character, actress Esther Blodgett, dissolves into hysterics in front of a studio head, “Cukor had Garland so worked up beforehand that she was sick, was physically throwing up,” the biographer wrote. “[But while] he might have been rough on Garland … it was for a purpose.”
In that scene, Esther is in her dressing room between takes. She’s wearing an absurd straw boater, heavy eye makeup, a cherry-red cardigan that matches her lipstick. Overly large freckles are drawn on her cheeks. Around her the room is full of reflections: crystal, mirrors, chrome; pink-and-silver cellophane around a bouquet of white flowers. When Oliver Niles asks after her husband—an alcoholic on an intense downward spiral—the cheeriness falls from her face like a person slipping into sleep. She gets up and fusses around a bit before sitting again to talk. She shakes, stammers, gasps shallowly and sharply between words, tilts her head back to catch her tears. Her eyes dart around, never settling on any one place except, occasionally, somewhere behind the camera. She sobs with abandon. Her hand goes to her mouth, as if she has just realized something she does not want to admit. She rubs her hands roughly over her cheeks, wiping away her freckles. “No matter how much you love somebody,” she ends, her voice soaked in misery and resignation, “how do you live out the days?”
The scene is unnerving, devastating, wildly effective. Were it not for my moral unease about the details of its creation, it would be difficult to argue with the results: a character who, like Gaslight’s Paula, truly seems on the verge of an acute nervous breakdown (and, unlike Gaslight, with the actress not too far behind). Once they’d finished shooting and Cukor had gotten what he wanted, “gentleness and humor took over.” He touched her on the shoulder and said, “Judy, Marjorie Main couldn’t have done that any better.”
As the scene draws to a close, Esther redraws her freckles, collects herself, and returns to the set. There, in front of so many people, she picks up right where she left off—arms flung open, and singing.
Dream House as the Wrong Lesson
When MGM made the Academy Award–winning version of Gaslight in 1944, they didn’t just remake it. They bought the rights to the 1940 film, “burned the negative and set out to destroy all existing prints.” They didn’t succeed, of course—the first film survived. You can still see it. But how strange, how weirdly on the nose. They didn’t just want to reimagine the film; they wanted to eliminate the evidence of the first, as though it had never existed at all.
Dream House as Déjà Vu
She says she loves you. She says she sees your subtle, ineffable qualities. She says you are the only one for her, in all the world. She says she trusts you. She says she wants to keep you safe. She says she wants to grow old with you. She says she thinks you’re beautiful. She says she thinks you’re sexy. Sometimes when you look at your phone, she has sent you something weirdly ambiguous, and there is a kick of anxiety between your lungs. Sometimes when you catch her looking at you, you feel like the most scrutinized person in the world.
Dream House as Apartment in Philadelphia
Many years later, I wrote part of this book in my apartment in West Philadelphia, the one I share with my wife. Before we moved here, we’d been living in a terrible, dark building nearby. There were mice and cockroaches. We had to lay traps. One morning, I walked out of my bedroom to make coffee and found a mouse sprawled on one of the glue traps, looking like an adventurer half-melted by acid in a forbidden temple. It squealed a horrible squeal. I googled “What to do about a mouse in a glue trap” and found an article with advice. In my pajamas I walked outside with the mouse and the trap in a plastic bag, and I stomped on it as hard as I could before tossing it in the dumpster.
As for the cockroaches, they made me feel like I was on the verge of madness and transcendence, like G.H. and her passion. At first, I was fastidious, looking for a paper towel to cleanly smash them as they darted around the counter. Then one day they moved into the digital clock in our microwave, and I could see them silhouetted there. The nymphs shed their skins against the glow, left part of themselves behind. After that, I developed the sort of detached practicality I had imagined was reserved for professional assassins in movies. Then, I killed them with my bare hands.
Dream House as Pathetic Fallacy
She, the woman in the Dream House, always buys too much produce. It never makes sense to you how s
he fills her fridge—every shelf bursting with leafy greens and robust stalks and thick roots and rotund bulbs, the bright, modern lines of the appliance utterly concealed. There is something sensual about it, almost erotic, until everything begins to go bad. Every time you open the fridge it smells more and more like a garden (dirt, rain, life), and then like a dumpster, and then, eventually, like death.
You mention it once, but then she does that thing where she repeats what you’ve said a few times, each time getting a little more sarcastic until you apologize, though you never know what you are apologizing for. It is her money, yes, her fridge. And her rot.
Dream House as the First Thanksgiving
You arrive in Bloomington just before the holiday to learn that she has invited her entire graduate cohort over for Thanksgiving.24 You stare at her in disbelief. “All of them?” you ask. You count the number of people in your head.
“But you have, like, two chairs,” you say. “Only one small table. You haven’t even really unpacked.”
She does not say anything.
“You told them it’s potluck style, right? They’re bringing their own side dishes, and we just have to do, like, a bird or something?”
“No,” she says. “No. That would be rude. We are taking care of people.”
“Who is going to take care of us?” you say. “I’m broke.”
“Don’t be such a fucking bitch,” she says.
This is how you find yourself at the Kroger’s at 11 p.m., alone, picking up groceries and trying to remember how you ended up there. You pay for all of it.
Back at the house you discover that she has only a handful of pans, too, and you defrost the Cornish game hens and baste them in oil and salt and pepper, and at some point you realize you’ll have to cut them in half. You’re not normally squeamish about meat but you find yourself balking at the idea of cracking through those backbones, pressing glistening spatchcocks down onto the aluminum foil.
“Help me,” you say.
She takes off her shirt and bra and cuts each of them with a pair of kitchen shears. The blades bite and open the birds from thigh to throat. The sound of it is terrible. It reminds you of the time you were ten feet from a lion in South Africa and it was tearing the skin off a zebra leg, and the caveman part of your brain was screaming RUN RUN RUN.
She pulls out the spines and turns the birds over; presses them into the pan like open books.
You are still cooking when people arrive, still cooking as people are laughing and eating off paper plates standing up and not quite looking at you.
24. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C745, Taboo: entertaining strangers.
Dream House as Diagnosis
Should you be concerned? You feel sick to your stomach almost constantly; the slightest motion makes you nauseated.25 There is a burning in your gut, cramping, too; acid, probably, and hopefully not cancer. You develop a tremor in your limbs, a weird closed-down sensation in your esophagus. You cry for no reason. You can’t come, can’t look her in the eye, can’t bring yourself to go to one more bar. Your back starts to hurt, and your feet, and a doctor says to you, direly, that you need to lose weight. You bawl your eyes out and miss the punch line entirely: the weight you need to lose is 105 pounds and blonde and sitting in the waiting room with an annoyed expression on her face.
25. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C940, Sickness or weakness for breaking taboo.
Dream House as I Love Lucy
There is an episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy meets Charles Boyer, the actor who played the evil husband in Gaslight. Concerned that Lucy’s passionate love for Boyer will result in some harebrained scheme and inevitable catastrophe, Ricky convinces Boyer to pretend to be someone else. Boyer agrees to play along and adopts a fictional persona, but (of course) chaos ensues, until, finally, Lucy discovers the deception.
Watching it, I can see the humor—the campiness of it, Lucy’s wide eyes and mugging for the camera, the crazy plotting and slapstick chaos that defines the show’s screwball pleasure. But behind all of that, he is saying I’m not who he is, and it is a game and she is certain but then she isn’t certain. I’m not; it becomes a funny joke, but the joke rests on the deception.
“That’s a dirty trick,” she says furiously when she learns the truth. Ricky chuckles.
Even now, I feel uneasy watching episodes of TV shows about mistaken or stolen identities. The slipperiness of reality that comes along with the comedic device of misunderstanding when someone is not mistaken at all feels uncomfortable to me. When I watched this episode, I could only see the way it eerily mirrored Gaslight’s domestic abuse: jealousy, raised voices, commands. “This is a private matter.” “You’re mine, mine, all mine.” All with a sheen of slapstick, of humorous distance. Isn’t this funny? This is funny! It’s so funny! It could be funny! One day this will be funny! Won’t it?
Dream House as Musical
You do not realize how much you sing until she tells you to stop singing.26 It seems that you sing everywhere: in the shower, washing the dishes, getting dressed. You sing musicals and hymns and old songs from childhood (from church, from school, from Girl Scouts). You make up songs, too, with lyrics for whatever is happening at the time. She sings along to music in the car, but only when the music is playing. You ask her to sing to you, without music, but she refuses.
During a rare moment of clarity, you tell her, sassily, that if she can’t accept your singing, she can’t accept you. It is supposed to be a joke, sort of, but it lands flat. “Maybe,” she says, her voice cold down to the pith.
26. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C481, Taboo: singing.
Dream House as Cautionary Tale
One weekday, when you drive back from the Dream House, you notice you’re low on gas as you blow past the Illinois-Iowa border. Your GPS tells you there is a gas station off a lonely, wind-strewn exit, and as soon as you get off you sense the mistake. It looks like a long country road; just cornfields punctuated with barns and houses. You keep driving; surely a gas station will creep up over the horizon? But every time you crest a hill, you just see more country roads. Should you turn back? Perhaps a station is just around the next turn? Twilight falls away, and suddenly the landscape flattens and is swallowed by darkness.
You pull the car over and consult your phone, but there is no signal. You sit there, breathing deeply. What would your dad say? What would anyone have done in this situation before cell phones? Should you walk? Should you go to someone’s front door? You just want to be home.
You have been screaming for a whole minute before you become fully aware of it. You are pounding the steering wheel—your poor car, she has never done anything except your bidding—and howling, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” You don’t know why you are crying. Everyone gets lost.
Dream House as Rapture
As a kid, you read those Left Behind books, and even watched the wooden, incoherent movie with Kirk Cameron. Cheap thrillers with apocalyptic themes and biblical righteousness: Could there have been anything else so perfectly constructed for your teenage self?
You were obsessed with the idea of the Rapture, even though your family never went to that sort of church. You found it intoxicating, disciplined. He could come at any moment. He could come and take the believers and leave with them, and you’d have to be ready. You had to be trembling, prepared, on edge, ready for the moment. You could never relax, never let down your guard. Because if he came and you failed the test—and Jesus would know the innermost chambers of your heart, you could not lie to him—you would be left behind, and you would remain with the nonbelievers (clutching the folded clothes of their taken loved ones) as the apocalypse tore the world apart.
Then one day you learned that rapture could also mean “blissful happiness,” and you understood, fully: that it is important to live in unyielding fear with a smile on your face.
Dream House as a Lesson in the Subjunctive
Yes, there are spider
s in the basement, and yes, the floors are so uneven you can feel them pushing your right leg up against your torso if you run too quickly from room to room, and yes she’s never unpacked and is using tall cardboard boxes filled with bric-a-brac as furniture, and yes the couch is so old you can feel the springs in your back, and yes she wants to grow pot in the basement, and yes every room has bad memories, but sure, the two of you could raise children here.
Dream House as Fantasy
Fantasy is, I think, the defining cliché of female queerness. No wonder we joke about U-Hauls on the second date. To find desire, love, everyday joy without men’s accompanying bullshit is a pretty decent working definition of paradise.
The literature of queer domestic abuse is lousy with references to this27 punctured28 dream,29 which proves to be as much a violation as a black eye, a sprained wrist. Even the enduring symbol of queerness—the rainbow—is a promise not to repeat an act of supreme violence by a capricious and rageful god: I won’t flood the whole world again. It was a one-time thing, I swear. Do you trust me? (And, later, a threat: the next time, motherfuckers, it’ll be fire.) Acknowledging the insufficiency of this idealism is nearly as painful as acknowledging that we’re the same as straight folks in this regard: we’re in the muck like everyone else. All of this fantasy is an act of supreme optimism, or, if you’re feeling less charitable, arrogance.
Maybe this will change someday. Maybe, when queerness is so normal and accepted that finding it will feel less like entering paradise and more like the claiming of your own body: imperfect, but yours.
In the Dream House Page 8
