Do you ever get the feeling you’re being lied to?
I don’t mean the kind of line you expect from the local used car salesman trying to con you into driving a lemon off the lot. I mean the lie from a trusted source, the lie so blatant, so shameless, that it makes you question reality itself. To quote the old Marx Brothers line, “who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” Chico was hilarious, but when it happens in real life instead of the theater, it’s no laughing matter. The feeling of being lied to so constantly that you begin to doubt reality itself was well known to anyone, like my parents, who lived under the Stalinist regimes of the 20th century – and, by wild coincidence, to anyone living in America the last few years. How does it feel, for instance, to have your pediatrician earnestly assure you that your baby doesn’t have a developmental need to see your face? You feel quite certain you’ve heard otherwise, but you check the pediatric authorities, and all the pages about the importance of face time you remember reading are… gone. Did you imagine it all? What other delusions have you harbored? Hmm, you could have sworn hearing something about masks being useless, but that can’t possibly be right…
Let me give our beleaguered public health authorities a break. It is Pride Month after all, and if that isn’t occasion to honor lies, I don’t know what is. We are in the 30th anniversary year of the most influential gay movie in Hollywood history, Philadelphia. Perhaps you are old enough to remember all the critical and cultural acclaim of that moment? Did you know that it was all an outright lie? Yes, now that the victory is won, the truth can be told. As this retrospective admits, honest gay activists hated the film. One explained, “If Hollywood is using this movie to make America love us, they are making them love a false image.” Another agreed that it was “dishonest.” As the author chronicles, though, most felt the deceit was worth it: “Tom Hanks’ character may have presented a stereotypical face, but it was a human face. In the end, most of the gay community forgave the film for its Disney-like depiction of gay life […] most in the GLBT community came to believe that visibility was more important than realism.” Visibility more important than realism: that’s a polite way of saying we lied to your faces, you dumb rubes.
You can tell the article is dated not only by its use of the since memory-holed “GLBT” acronym (Gs don’t get to be first, that’s sexist!), but for its use of the phrase “Disney-like depiction of gay life,” which has a whole different connotation today than it did upon Philadelphia’s release. Of course, had people in the 90s known that mustachioed princesses were soon to be in charge of their four-year-old’s Disney makeover, and that to object may land you on an FBI watchlist, well, Tom Hanks might not have won that Oscar. We’ve come a long, long way from “how is my marriage going to affect you?”, haven’t we? The wisest among us knew what was happening as it happened, but the rest of us fell for the lies. And now we wonder if anything anybody tells us is true.
I can thus think of no better movie to kick off Pride Month than tonight’s pick, from 1944: Gaslight. You’ve heard the term. You’ve lived the term. Now go watch the riveting classic that gave this form of lying its name. In the film, it’s not a trusted institution, like the CDC or the local public school, that aims to deceive. It’s far, far worse than that: the villain is our heroine’s beloved husband. Your spouse can drive you crazy when they’re not even trying – but what happens when they do try? Then again, what if your spouse isn’t tricking you, and it’s all in your head? Whom to turn to? Whom to trust?
So take a break from our own gaslighting authorities for a couple hours with the far more enjoyable experience of watching the legendary Ingrid Bergman on screen, opposite greats like Charles Boyer and Joseph Cotten – and yes, that’s Angela Lansbury being memorably ill-behaved in her first screen role. You will love watching the whole thriller unfold – but if you’re at all like me, the highlight will be watching how the victim turns the tables on the victimizer.
I hope you enjoy it! Just remember, this kind of gaslighting is not the end, it’s only the beginning. The next stage? Nobody put it better than Solzhenitsyn:
We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying.
As the gaslighting gets more and more brazen, don’t forget Solzhenitsyn’s remedy to this world of lies:
“And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! […] ONE WORD OF TRUTH SHALL OUTWEIGH THE WHOLE WORLD.”
Enjoy the movie, and live not by lies!
I might have to watch that movie - living it sure hasn’t been fun. Kinda sad to see that as much as I wanted to trust propaganda - I mean mainstream media - I knew even ol Walter Cronkite was spewing what the bosses told him to. Thankfully though we all know how bad it is and change will come whether we want it to or not - because as water seeks its own level so does truth. Eventually.
This is spot on. A strange part of my personal history is that my widowed Christian mother became something of a *ag Hag (a term I suspect to be completely unPC these days that refers to an older straight woman who hung out primarily with gay men.) Her next door neighbors were a lesbian couple, which, unlike today, didn’t happen unless you actually lived in their neighborhood.
So in my 20s just BEFORE & then during the first years of “The AIDS crisis” I had a front row seat to the realities of the “gay community”—including what PRIDE parades were really intended to be (though I personally steered clear of them.)
So I watched with bemusement as this “community” later fought with itself over these events as raw, explicit exhibitionism vs. a cleaned up “family-friendly” corporate-sponsored version. The fighting was so fierce, I think one of them was actually canceled. Many gays expressed displeasure at being “assimilated” into the mainstream. It wasn’t the lifestyle they’d signed on to perform.
[edit: Rod Dreher’s TAC blog used to have comments by an insightful gay conservative who worked in academia. I will always remember one he wrote about gay dating apps — that they would ‘make a mother weep.’ He also made an insightful observation about Big Pharma employing a lot of gay men. You’d think they of all people would know from experience that pharma is not a benefactor it’s a life-long drug-dealer.]