The Gaslighting on Gaslighting

The message throughout popular culture is that lunatics know best

I’ve just watched the fourth episode of Lauren LeFranc’s Penguin series, which follows on from the Matt Reeves DC films such as 2022’s The Batman. It was a fascinating episode in multiple ways and like the best popular culture products often do touched on a whole range of significant issues, both purposefully and in some ways unintentionally.

At the start I should say that I’m not one of those people who think that popular culture is unimportant. There’s a strong instinct among people who tend to share my general politics that this stuff doesn’t matter, and that instinct expresses itself in multiple ways. Some people will tell you that Hollywood is dead or dying. Others will be content with a level of response stuck at ‘go woke, go broke’. Traditionalist philosophers and aesthetes will compare the truly great works of world and western civilization with 20th or 21st century popular forms and see such a gulf in quality and aesthetic worth, of seriousness and achievement, as to render any concern about modern popular culture almost an insult to the past.

All of these positions have at least some truth to them. I don’t see recent popular culture as a thing that has stood the test of time and proven its worth. I don’t believe academic courses on the music of The Beatles (let alone the music of Beyonce or Taylor Swift) adds value and meaning sufficient to deserve public funding or was really what was intended by the scholars and academics of the past as the kind of culture worth studying and preserving. Rather, courses on popular culture are reflective of the lack of genuine scholarly standards in academia, and the part profit, part ideology driven quest to sell people easy courses of no inherent worth that any know nothing moron can easily pass.

So I get that some people will say ‘why is he talking about a tired old comic book character on a streamed TV series’.

Nevertheless, for me popular culture is not just entertainment. It has never just been entertainment. For better or worse, it presents an incredibly rich commentary on the times in which it is produced, a mirror of the now that even in its distortions tells us something worth hearing. And it does this regardless of aesthetic worth.

If a culture is consuming trash, that tells you as much about the culture as its very best productions do, perhaps much more.

In our times too, the expansion of radical progressive ideology, the expansion of the State, and a period in which free speech, free thought and even creativity itself is under sustained political assault, has seen popular culture become regime propaganda to such an extent that you can’t be fully serious without recognizing the impact and influence of trivialities.

Taylor Swift or P.Diddy or Lady Gaga may be aesthetically worthless junk culture with nothing interesting or original in their content, but they do say something about our times. Barbie may not be a good film, but a billion dollar grossing film is still telling us a lot about our culture (God help us).

Penguin, of course, is a lot better than that. As far as popular culture can succeed on an aesthetic level, it does, just as a show like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad did. These are, by modern standards, very well written and very slickly produced entertainment sagas eliciting high quality acting and directing performances out of the people involved in them.

Even contemporary or popular culture products you wanted to like and didn’t function as a societal Funhouse mirror, exaggerating certain features of the real world in ways that actually give us very clear reflections of the nature of the culture we are living in. Take something like the recent films of Denis Villeneuve (the two Dune movies, and Blade Runner 2049). These are, on the whole, critically acclaimed offerings. They are also thought of as artistic movies dealing with important (even profound) themes. Dune franchise territory, for instance, covers topics like theocracy, fascism, dictatorship, genocide, prophecy, religious fanaticism and eugenics. It’s not drawing on light or superficial sources. And Villeneuve has probably the best ‘eye’ in contemporary cinema, supplying a canvas of images which evoke all the beauty, possibility and yearning at the core of science fiction as a genre.

But these films are films from a director who has expressed total contempt for script, plot and dialogue. This is a director who is both a seasoned professional at the top of his industry and a person so idiotic regarding his own field of professional expertise that he can genuinely think that a movie is just a succession of images and that script, dialogue and plot add nothing to that experience.

Doesn’t that contrast say something about the ‘experts’ of modern times more generally, about 21st century technocrats, about this specific cultural moment in which the most professional people can be both skilled at what they do….and astonishingly stupid about what they do at the same time?

Is Villeneuve’s contempt for script just a reflection of his own flaws and errors, or does it suggest a broader cultural malaise and degeneracy, a quick image culture, a battleground of memes, a society degrading into a post-literary form where even our creatives don’t like to read and are incapable of recognizing and respecting the intricacies and beauties, the creative possibilities, of well-crafted literature.

Because film isn’t and has never been solely about the images. It has always been about the words, too, even in the silent era. That was why silent movies had dialogue and text added to them. In the original Blade Runner the most powerful image of the movie is also the moment of the most striking, brilliant and original dialogue. It’s the death of Roy Batty, in the rain, talking about how his experiences, memories and sentient uniqueness is all washed away by Death. Would the image alone have the power it has to be the core of the film and encompass everything the film is saying without those extraordinarily haunting, evocative and beautiful words that Rutger Hauer added to the script as an improvisation? No, it wouldn’t.

There is no such moment in the Blade Runner sequel. There is nothing that will be remembered in this way in Villeneuve’s Dune movies either. The old adage is that a picture paints a thousand words, and the false understanding is that film is a visual experience. But good writing….good writing can paint a thousand pictures in a paragraph of dialogue, or less. And film is an auditory experience as well as a visual one. That’s why there are film composers, just as that is also why movies written by bad writers flop more often than they succeed.

All this is basic stuff, basic awareness, and one of the top paid directors and most successful film directors in the world doesn’t know it.

Now translate what that not knowing the basics says about our general societal competence. Think about this being the case with our foreign policy advisors, and our economists, and our mental health professionals, our journalists, our doctors, our engineers, our climate change scientists, our pandemic advisors, our ‘world leaders’.

Hey, look at that-they can have strange ideas and odd ideologies they think are firmly rooted in their professional experience, expertise, credentials and success….which are bullshit.

As I said recently to the excellent film critic Wade Major, the effect of a Villenueve movie is to leave you half stunned at the perfection of the images, and half bored into insensibility by the paucity of the script. In the end you feel dissatisfied, and nothing stays with you. In the end what was a glimpse of perfect imagery becomes a leaden weight of disappointment, because there’s no human heart in there, because the characters are far more shallow then they were in a novel, and because vital elements of plot are left on the cutting room floor to give time for another Glorious Canvas.

Never has science fiction been quite so bereft of ideas. Villeneuve only wants the image. The scenes and plot and dialogue are just like a director saying ‘stand there, move to that door, turn around’. They are just mechanics to get the actors moved to the next beautiful backdrop. And this in the end is the ultimate fate of the Green Screen era-film becomes a landscape instead of a portrait. But all the human interest is in the portraits.

Portraits that can’t be fully built without words, because no film director (much as they would like to be) is Rembrandt or Vermeer.

Graphic novels and comic books of course are where the true masters of immediate, impactful, bang for your buck imagery make their living. They have to fit a world in a frame far smaller than a painting or a cinema screen, and they don’t have two hours with a person trapped in a seat they paid for. So anyone, no matter how competent or incompetent, presenting a TV or film version of DC Universe (or Marvel Universe) characters has all the images they will ever need to draw on. They have 40,50, sometimes even 70 or 80 years of images, plots, dialogue and creativity to draw on.

Every major comic book character has had decade after decade of storytelling poured into them. Really its almost criminal to produce a bad movie in the superhero genre-far from being a genre that is inherently superficial, low brow and child oriented as some actors and cultural snobs opine, you’ve got such a deep and beloved body of lore to draw from that it should be impossible to fuck it up.

But of course people ARE fucking it up, continuously. And frequently by using these movies as a crude vehicle for their own politics and prejudices. Which means that these popular culture products are politically significant.

They are where directors, actors, movie studios, Hollywood and the entertainment and media complex announce their opinions, prejudices and desires.

They are where these people try to shape and direct social attitudes, cultural attitudes, and sexual attitudes in the general public.

And they are where we see the extent to which bad ideas, false reasoning, tawdry propaganda and idiotic assumptions have taken control of our society, as well as the gap between all this and the real opinions of the general public.

We even get to see how much money the Powers That Be are prepared to lose in direct indoctrination campaigns masquerading as commercial entertainment enterprises.

With all this in mind, back to the fourth episode of Penguin. It’s by far the most interesting and (in that mirror of our times sense) significant of the four episodes to have come so far.

It’s an episode in which Colin Farrell’s Penguin, the eponymous character and core focus of the first three episodes, takes a front seat as we see him back when he was acting as Sofia Falcone’s driver-which means (I don’t know if this is a deliberate joke or just something I spotted) it is also the episode in which he takes a back seat in terms of who the episode covers and follows.

Episode Four is all about Sofia Falcone (a wonderful, expressive performance by Cristin Milioti). It is mainly composed of long sequences explaining Sofia’s backstory in this version of events, particularly her incarceration in Arkham Asylum.

For me, at least, just about everything in this episode is interesting and prompts reflections on the state of the real world that produces such an entertainment experience. It’s an episode that in both the elements that work and the elements that don’t work tells us something worth knowing. Let’s get the most superficial level acknowledgements out of the way first.

Cristin Milioti, physically, is perfectly cast. Pale, petite, with dark hair and even darker eyes, she hovers on the borderline between spookily unusual and mesmerically attractive. She has the kind of looks that can play a witch, a geek or a lunatic convincingly, but with something too of the waif, the socialite, and the innocent. She has a quality of petite restrained energy that is like the dark, moonlit counterpart to the sunny kookiness of a young Goldie Hawn. She can be beautiful in a slightly unconventional way. All of this gives her advantages in the role that she adds to with excellent actorly judgement.

Some of the transitions she enacts between frightened innocent and cold, hard gang leader from a sociopathic, Mafia style comic book crime family are just perfect, sustaining an ambiguity about the character that presents her as both wronged heroine and budding potential supervillain. It’s often in the back stories of the villains (rather than the heroes) that the superhero genre really thrives, and Milioti seems to fully understand this.

The performance might seem over-wrought to someone unfamiliar with the conventions of the genre, or too dependent on an extraordinarily dark, liquid gaze that widens and widens until the eye seems like nothing but a portal into horror. But its so well judged. She does boredom and anxiety all in the way she smokes a cigarette (very Noir) and manages to put resignation, determination and anger into something as small as the gesture of flicking it away. She covers similar ground at times to portrayals of Harley Quinn, but never has to resort to the giggling murderous little girl trope (supplied in a competent enactment of another female villain in the same episode, the character Magpie). There’s a bit of Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday Adams in a few flat stares and a more confident stalk at the end of the episode, all of which seems a natural progression from the same character reacting in terror to her original confinement.

Farrell has produced a thoughtful, expert (in the true sense) and at times brilliant version of Penguin in this series (although I don’t think anyone will ever top Robin Lord Taylor’s Gotham version) that goes along with his performance in Sugar to show us just how underrated he has been, but given a whole episode devoted to her character, Milioti puts forward a convincing case for an entire franchise of her own. It’s that good, easily surpassing any other female ‘baddie’ performance I’ve seen in this genre.

With that said, what’s really interesting here is the context and the subtext. Sadly, I have to move from the aesthetics to the politics.

On the surface, Penguin isn’t one of those obvious, off-puttingly woke efforts that long-term genre fans end up despising. It’s not an Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, or a Barbie or (horror beyond imagining) an Acolyte. It’s not a Joker 2 either.

Sofia Falcone is not a Mary Sue character presented as a feminist slam dunk out-performing every man in every regard. She’s a semi-minor supporting character given a chance to shine with great casting and a single episode devoted almost exclusively to her.

But in this case the changes from the source material are very, very telling. Without ever straying into Kathleen Kennedy type hectoring, episode 4 of Penguin IS selling the now very familiar messages on feminism, male toxicity and more broadly on mental health and mental illness. It’s just being done by much better writers and directors who have learned that people want an actual story rather than the writers contemporary real world political speeches being shoved through the body and out of the mouth of tissue thin characters who only exist to sell that line.

Episode 4 of Penguin doesn’t forget that the first job is entertainment, and far more discreetly attaches The Message to a great performance and an entertaining episode. From those using popular entertainment to sell progressive attitudes, its a much more subtle and skillful approach, so we should hope in a way that the cruder efforts continue. For those of us who want to read our times accurately, it delivers the same truth regarding progressive control of popular culture that many of us have long been aware of, but does so in a way that (if copied elsewhere) will be more difficult to spot and oppose.

And it’s all evident in the changes that were made from the graphic novel sources. In those (Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s 1996 miniseries Batman: The Long Halloween and the sequel Batman: Dark Victory) Sofia Falcone has almost none of the innocence and fear that the 2024 Penguin version has. In those sources (spoiler alert) , Sofia serves a prison sentence and later (in Dark Victory) is revealed as a manipulative and cunning serial killer who has faked permanent injury to present as less dangerous than she actually is. She kills her brother Alberto, tries to kill the rival villain Two Face (Harvey Dent), and is generally the author of her own reverses and criminal status.

In the current incarnation (major spoilers here) she is much more of a victim. In fact, she is so much of a victim that she fits the play origins of the term gaslighting. In this version, Sofia Falcone is a child who finds her mother’s body after an alleged suicide, a young woman who then seeks to do good and run a Foundation (how typically wealthy Democrat of her) dedicated to preventing female suicide and helping suicidal or abused women and a person who simultaneously loves her father but is not shown as actively engaged in his crime empire (although she does seem eager to inherit it). In the modern version, she is falsely set up as a serial killer who is sent to Arkham Asylum and tortured with electric shock therapy and deadly encounters with other inmates essentially on the orders of her father and other criminal relatives afraid that she will (on asking questions about her mother’s death and talking to a reporter about the victims of The Hangman) expose or betray them. The implication (which might be contradicted in subsequent episodes) is that her father Carmine has a penchant for strangling women, killed her mother and women who worked at a club he owned as hookers, and then framed her for these crimes.

Much of the episode then presents Sofia as a classic victim of gaslighting at its most extreme and of patriarchal authority at its most brutal. Her father and her family pretend she is mad when she isn’t. The authorities corruptly accept the word and the testimony of these betraying male family members. Her father and then her uncle treat her as inferior, hysterical and delusional (the more so the closer she gets to the truth).

Her voice is not heard. Her mental stability is falsely questioned. Her freedom is curtailed. Every man in her life abuses and betrays her, save one (her brother Alberto in this version is a weakling who can’t stop the family’s treatment of his sister, but at least believes her and offers support). The Penguin is just one of multiple men who lie to her and play a part in ten years of her life being taken from her. The only therapist who seems to realize she might be innocent also gives off an air of creepy sexual attraction and motivation in his minimal and guilt ridden ‘help’. The interesting thing is that even family members who must have been in on the lies all treat her as if she really does have a kind of contagious mark of insanity. The only people who don’t are small children (not yet conditioned in Patriarchy attitudes, obviously).

All of this presents a radical feminist reading of the treatment of ALL women in a male dominated society, and the leap from compelling story to propaganda piece only takes seeing some broader lessons about male behavior and female victimhood in how this all plays out. This lesson is intended and there, as when Sofia asserts that “the world” is like this, the world is sick (and dominated by sick men). The pill of this feminist framing is only more easily swallowed because of better writing, better acting and a certain patience that builds the story and the character before putting any undergraduate lectures in her mouth. It’s a very good show Patriarchy piece rather than a very clumsy tell Patriarchy piece and gets that this fare is much more effective as a small poison pill in the hand of a good story than as a five minute monologue interrupting the entertainment.

Even beyond the somewhat more subtle than usual feminist messaging (occasionally straying into the unsubtle-at one point Sofia tells Oz/Penguin that he has hopes of promotion because “you have a dick”), the whole issue of gaslighting and insanity is very, very telling in relation to contemporary politics.

What a story like this does is suggest that the entire structure of psychiatry and mental health and the diagnosis of insanity is merely an apparatus of control and that insanity is not real. It’s a social construct, or in some ways an entirely justified and inevitable response to abuse. Everyone in these sort of narratives has a good environmental reason for being ‘insane’ themselves-they have ALL been mistreated, abused, harmed, betrayed, witnessed horror or had some totally logical trigger of their actions.

The only difference between sane and insane really is whether the powerful want you in an asylum. The only difference between hero and villain is whether your violence suits the authorities. Batman and The Joker, or a female heroine opposed to Sofia, are only different by (at most) degree, rather than nature. The whole ethos and character of Gotham is of course that everything is corrupt, everyone is perverse, all institutions are built on lies and all dreams are nightmares. Batman is trying to save something that is rotten to the core, and that’s true of both his city and his soul, with most stories focusing not in sharp bright differences between good and evil but on a murky smeared background of shared sins and darker instincts. There’s this tiny fragile degree of self restraint or this tiny little flickering flame of hope (points of light in the surrounding darkness) and only they distinguish between sane and insane, or between good and evil.

This kind of Gotham then is Patriarchy as imagined by feminists through and through, toxic, dishonest, built on harm to women, with both the ‘heroes’ and the ‘criminals’ being fist first, justice never, cycle of violence frauds.

Now all this is also of course sheer nonsense in terms of the real world. The simplicities of feminist rhetoric are not exposed truths, but just a different set of imposed falsehoods (currently dominant in the real world).

In reality, there are far more male suicides than female ones. In reality, men bear the brunt of male violence (yes, even with the existence and motivation of rape, most violence is men hurting other men rather than men hurting women). In reality, at least before the mass importation of Third World attitudes and persons, the chances of being attacked on the street or raped or sent to an asylum by your serial killer crime boss father where every doctor licks his lips while torturing you are all rather remote.

The Message, though, says different. The Message says that this is not just fictional Gotham. This is real New York. And its real London. And its real Everywhere. Because this is what men do.

Not specific types of men, with specific religious instructions on taking sex slaves.

Not specific types of men, with zero criminal checks coming in from barbaric cultures and regions.

The last thing The Message wants is specificity, because that is racist and xenophobic and suggests that there comes a point where ethnic fusion restaurants aren’t worth the price that’s been paid.

Much better to condemn OUR culture, and believe that all men are rapists. That’s the lesson that this version of Gotham really needs to sell, and it needs to sell that precisely at the point where the majority start to realize just how much the actual dystopia is built on open borders and leftist social policies.

This is why nihilistic dystopias become the highest art of popular culture. Put it on the screen in a very particular way and it allows you to pretend the real streets aren’t getting worse at all.

Make it fiction and you can pretend any similar and growing reality is ALSO fiction whilst offering your feminist reading of why shit happens instead.

Ultimately too, the lesson becomes that insanity is just about respective levels of power, the Foucault semi-Marxist view (a view which is itself pretty deranged). Present gaslighting narratives and hint that it was ever so, or it is universally so, and your mental imbalance in the real world is sanitized and justified.

It’s not that you are supporting crazy policies, ideologies and lifestyle choices that are damaging and irrational. It’s “the world” as male construct that is crazy. You’re like Sofia. You’re innocent. You’re the victim. Your victimhood is both tragedy and triumph, the ultimate seal of all justifications.

The gaslight story version of who Sofia is emerges precisely because WE are being gaslit, NOT the character. We get these narratives because over 50% of Generation Z females are mentally unstable and voting on the basis of that instability and because the kind of people who decide what films and TV shows say want that to be the case. The entire topic emerges from feminist delusion and fantasy and from our societal departure from shared agreements on what is real. That is both why the gaslighting story arc is more common now and why its worth hearing what popular culture fictions are talking about.