Gaslit

Originally Published in the Disability Busters Newsletter October 2024

Trigger Warning: Contains confronting material

Disability Busters film Gaslit is a difficult film to watch, dealing with some of the ways people with disabilities are discriminated against and psychologically abused. The definition of gaslighting is “to cause (a person) to doubt their judgment, memory, or sanity through the use of psychological manipulation”. It has become a hot topic of conversation as people, particularly women in abusive relationships come to terms with the emotional and psychological scars that are left.

If you have spent years being gaslit yourself it may resonate so take care when watching it. You may wish to take some time out then return to it. I watched the original version, not realising there was an audio described version and there was so much I missed by not understanding the visual elements. After watching the audio described version, I picked up things I hadn’t noticed before, so if you have a vision impairment, give the audio description a go even if you think you might not need it!

The beginning of Gaslit shows a child crawling then speeding along in an electric wheelchair. I love this because it shows joy and freedom, making use of the world around her, adapting to it and thriving. She says in the voice over that, “You could tell I was going to be a writer, I always loved getting books for Christmas,”

When I was a child, I wanted to be a police officer, and a writer. Yes, two very different jobs but I saw them both as having purpose. Just like the young woman in Gaslit, I said, “I’ll go to uni, I’ll take on the world”.

Skipping to adulthood, the film shows the woman attending a fancy party, having a glass of wine and being asked ‘should you be drinking that?’ Seriously? Her impairment has nothing to do with her ability nor the appropriateness of her having a drink. She’s not a child, yet like many people with disabilities, she is infantilised.

A random red headed woman walks up to her and starts praying for her right there and then. When I saw this I almost shrieked ‘that happened to me!’ A random woman approached me while I was waiting to get picked up from university. I had my long cane out and was standing there, minding my own business when she approached and asked if she could pray for me and give me a hug. I was about eighteen or nineteen and shocked that anyone, let alone a random person would think this was a reasonable thing to do.

The film includes people telling the young woman’s family that it “must be so hard” to deal with the individual’s disability. Well yeah, it can be hard but so can life in general really. It needs to be questioned why the lives of people with disabilities are thought to be any more difficult than the lives of people who don’t have disabilities.

Someone removes a whisk and bowl from her lap even though she says she can do it, looking down at her empty hands, we understand the symbolism of this, that she has her right to do things herself taken away from her. She’s left with nothing. That’s what I find perplexing when people argue that people with disabilities need to be empowered to do things for themselves. The truth is often we are, but if our choices are taken away from us and we’re not left with any options then we are all left with nothing.

The Mum says ‘I’m sorry I can’t fix you’ before they go to the doctor and start talking about her reproductive choices without her consent. See, right there, it’s her body, it should be her choice but because she has a disability her rights aren’t viewed the same.

She goes for interviews and is told things like ‘we’d have to remodel the stairs’ and ‘this is not a charity’. I thought it was so interesting the interviewee asking if she can type in a really condescending way, then making typing gestures with her fingers as though the woman doesn’t understand what she means.

People sometimes assume for some reason that if you have one disability, you have them all, a really ableist and frankly just weird way of looking at things.

The boyfriend says, ‘You’re lucky I love you”, and “I’m not your personal servant”. Instead of blaming the systems of discrimination that make people with disabilities dependent, he blames her for having a disability and frames himself as the moral saviour.

The film then overlaps with the boyfriend telling her she “must have misinterpreted” her support workers actions”. This annoyed me so much! As someone with short term memory problems as well as being legally blind, I too have been told I have done this in situations, whether it be not seeing what is happening correctly or not remembering exactly what happened (leading to the assumption that I have misinterpreted the entire series of events).

This gaslighting is how abuses of power and discrimination are enacted. Sometimes people don’t mean to be gaslighting, but it’s time we call it out. We know what’s going on, its time to stop trying to make us think we don’t. While this is a confrontingly accurate depiction, there is so much truth in this film about the way disabled people experience the world. The film is essential viewing.