Gaslit

What does it mean when it’s everybody?

Gaslit (2022)

Starz; 4 / 5

There is a scene halfway through the fourth episode of this yawn-one-more-show-about-Watergate show where it pulls back the curtain and its genius slides into the spotlight. Judy Hoback, the great whistleblower of the historical scandal, is sitting in a surreptitious meeting at a diner with the beleaguered FBI agents who have been stonewalled by the Committee to Re-Elect the President (referred to by the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up acronym CREEP). With total clarity, she explains that everybody’s dirty but nothing can be done about it because the institutions of the US government have all been corrupted to serve both “the elites” and more terribly “the shameless.” And immediately after she explains to the agents that even their bureau has been co-opted as a shield by the unscrupulously ambitious, they promise that the FBI will protect her identity. And she believes them. 

This scene is the moment where Gaslit’s point crystallizes, and we start to see the essence of the title. Because up to this point, the question nags: who is actually being gaslit here? The answer should provoke some deep thought from any observer. Everyone is, and they’re doing it to themselves. Everyone in the show is willfully denying reality. All the people involved are selling a curated image of themselves to everybody else, and everyone knows everybody’s lying, and everybody chooses to believe the lies. The events of the Watergate break-in are demonstrably, absurdly useless (and kudos to the showrunners for not slavishly supporting the American myth that this molehill was actually a mountain–there’s a gaslighting conversation to be had about that, for sure). Nothing really happened, but everybody lying to everybody about it turned it into something monstrous. The people directly involved (Liddy, McCord) are deluded fools. Their bosses (Dean, Mitchell) are deluded fools. Their bosses (Haldeman and by extension Nixon) are so wrapped up in highest-level powerbrokering paranoia they don’t even notice the comedy of errors building beneath them that will bring it all down. 

The authorial intent of Gaslit is probably to skewer the political right one more time (the involvement of Sean Penn alone would seem to guarantee that at least some involved believed they were striking one more woke blow against “fascism” or whatever). But the execution of the show turns it into a broader, and savage, condemnation of American government corruption based not on money, but on bureaucrats’ delusions of grandeur. Gaslit’s portrayal of the madness of highest-level powerbrokering paranoids shielding themselves behind multiple echelons of deluded fools should sober and chill even the hardest partisan on any side of the political divide. All of those echelons are still in place and still populated by the same kinds of paranoids and fools. Government is power, and power corrupts, and nothing has changed from then to now.    

4 stars of 5: This could get taught in college history classes. It’s worth signing up for a trial of Starz to watch.