Gaslit

Someone I know recently told me to watch “Friends with Money,” a 2006 almost rom com about rich anxious women in Los Angeles. It was pitched to me as “Sex and the City but class-conscious.” It may not be that exactly but it does think about money. I told my mother to watch it and she said she had already recommended it to me before, mainly because of a scene where Jennifer Aniston washes her face very carefully and thoroughly with an expensive cleanser sample she has grifted her into at the mall. It made me think of you, my mother told me.

I had the uneasy sense, watching the movie, that maybe there was more to it than that. Jennifer Aniston plays the hanger on of the friend group. The others are wealthier, married, settled, seem older than her. She has quit her job as an elementary school teacher and is cleaning houses for a living, roleplaying as working class. She tries to sympathize with her friends’ housecleaners, who have no patience for her. She is a stoner, she borrows money, she can’t decide what to do with her life. She starts sleeping with a personal trainer and decides to become a personal trainer even though she can’t run for the bus without getting a cramp. She has a familiar mixture of idealism and contrarianism, stuckness masquerading as principle. She can’t understand why her friends attend fancy charity galas rather than just donating money directly. At the charity gala, she gleefully takes everyone’s giveaway bags filled with candles and soaps and beauty products. By the end of the movie, she has met a man who seems to drift in similar ways to her, her perfect match. By a stroke of luck, it turns out he is unemployed because he is independently wealthy. Her life suddenly takes on new color and possibility. It is possible to live lazily and beautifully and never work again. She has come into money.

Romance is the primary avenue towards success and prosperity in rom coms. Like Elizabeth Bennett, young women in these movies routinely find that the frog they found prickly and unbearable has turned into a prince, willing to secure their futures. When the movies depart from this script, it is often with strange results. Over Christmas, feverish and doped up on NyQuil, I watched a Hallmark type Netflix movie called “Hotel for the Holidays,” which basically transfers the anxieties and optimism the rom com expresses about the nuclear family onto a workplace instead. I thought about writing something about the movie when I watched it, but it seemed like an addled reflection of my sickly mind. The movie is not very good. It has the clunky feel of a formulaic genre film without much of its attending charm. It stars Madelaine Petsch (Cheryl Blossom in Riverdale), who I find incredibly annoying. It’s not really that deep.

But it is a funny reimagining of the Christmas rom com, which increasingly seems to center around work. Generally, it does so in a Family Stone kind of way, mirroring Sarah Jessica Parker’s journey from uptight workaholic to someone who sees the value in family and relaxation (and, by extension, Christmas). Falling for Christmas, starring Lindsay Lohan as a self-involved rich influencer, basically follows this script. Lohan has a ski accident, develops amnesia, and ends up working at a small inn where she finds love and self-fulfillment. Like Falling for Christmas, Hotel for the Holidays is about hotel management. Unlike Falling for Christmas or even Holiday Inn, it eschews the clash of small town and cynical capitalist values in favor of a more straightforward story about workplace relationships.

It’s set at a fancy hotel in Manhattan and has a bewildering number of secondary plots, including one about an out of touch pop star, a meet cute involving a runaway dog, and a literal escapee prince, fleeing his throne Harry Windsor style. The main plot is about Madelaine Petsch, the hotel manager, who is trying to secure funding to open her own hotel. This one will be nearly identical, except she will have equity in it. Her coworkers, when they find out, feel incredibly betrayed. They act like she’s dying even though she is planning to work very nearby in the same industry. All of her plans sort of come together on Christmas Eve, but when she gets locked in the lobby of her new building dressed in a white pantsuit like the girlboss she is trying to become, she suddenly understands the value of her coworkers. She gives up on the new hotel. She starts a romance with the chef at the old hotel, who has been pining for her the whole movie, not very subtly. She gets promoted, as a reward for her loyalty, and gives raises to her coworkers - or at least to the ones she’s friends with.

It kind of feels like a story about worker solidarity, but there’s no real instance of solidarity. The workers at the hotel all love their boss, who is conspicuously absent on vacation in France. Instead, it is a story about how a job can be a family. None of the hotel workers appear to have families. They never leave the hotel. It’s not even clear if they have homes. They find not so much solidarity as companionship in each other. They are, literally, married to work.

I worked for a while at a used clothing store in Chelsea. We used to have regular staff meetings on Sunday mornings that everyone was required to attend, whether or not they had a shift that day. We would watch things like training videos on how to be cheerful at work and listen to presentations about how much money the company had made over each quarter, broken down with shrinkage and labor and rent and inventory costs. Ostensibly, the goal of this was to encourage us to view the company’s successes as our successes. What it really was, oddly enough, was a precise breakdown of how much money they made off of our labor.

I liked my coworkers there but they were mostly college students and would come and go regularly. People also got fired a lot, mostly for being late, but also allegedly for stealing, and implicitly, for being on their managers’ bad side. The main issue I had with the job was that the store was absolutely disgusting. it was infested with mice which we would see all over the place when we were cleaning. Management didn’t want to pay for extra trash pickups so we would store trash bags for days on end in a closet that was supposed to be kept empty for fire safety reasons. The breakroom, like any breakroom full of college students doing whippets in their lunch hour, was filthy. I filed a complaint with OSHA who apparently came to inspect and fined them. At our next staff meeting, my boss assembled us all and took on mournful tone of a scolding parent. I can’t remember exactly how his speech went, but in my head it’s very dramatic. Someone in our ranks had betrayed the company. We had been a family. Now trust was irrevocably broken. They must have known it was me, because right after I gave notice, they fired me, circumventing my two remaining weeks.

This is not the only workplace I’ve ever been in which took on this familial logic, although they were perhaps the most explicit about it. At a more recent job, my employer considered it a personal betrayal when anyone quit or complained, often lashing out with threats and emotional manipulation. If the family is increasingly fragmented and increasingly subsumed in popular culture to other kinds of interpersonal networks, its most violent logic is frequently transposed directly onto these new formations. If work is a family, it is the kind of family that holds you hostage with threats of starvation, eviction, and financial ruin. It is, in other words, an abusive family.

In The New Yorker, early this week, Leslie Jamison published a long essay about gaslighting, titled provocatively, “So You Think You’ve Been Gaslight?” It is a kind of event unto itself when Leslie Jamison publishes anything, and moreover, gaslighting is a hot cultural buzzword right now. It is a prime example of “concept creep,” a concept being overused to the point of meaninglessness, which was essentially what Jamison was examining, and also taps into an ever expanding debate about the limits of subjectivity, the #MeToo movement, whether conflict is or is not actually abuse.

There is a type of reflexivity I struggle with in Leslie Jamison’s writing. Probably unfairly, because I suspect that my writing has the same inflection. She often draws attention to the fact that she is writing in a way that relativizes her own position within the story, points out its artificiality. In this essay, she seems to be discovering or puzzling out the meaning of gaslighting along with the reader. She goes and talks to specialists. She has revelations that seem undermined later on by further revelations about blame, personal responsibility, about the meaning of shared truth between people. This is not helped by the fact that several of the prominent examples in the essay do not seem like good examples of gaslighting. There is no subtlety or slow manipulation to them. They are out and out examples of sexual abuse and coercion. The example the piece opens with describes a young woman whose first boyfriend physically abused her, taking advantage of her inexperience. The gaslighting part, it seems, is that he told her she was crazy or defective for taking issue with his behavior. By framing the story with the context that the young woman grew up in a sheltered, conservative environment and believed that women were essentially meant to submit to men and their demands, Jameson hints at the larger sociological framing of gaslighting: one in which women are routinely described as crazy or hysterical for describing violence, misogyny, abuse. (The second example I would not describe as gaslighting involves a teenage girl whose father encourages her to participate in her own molestation by a friend of his and is similarly framed.)

If the point is that some of what we call gaslighting dovetails with these large structures and some of it is simply interpersonal misunderstanding, the essay doesn’t really clarify the distinction. It is true that other people experience a different reality than us and that it can be impossible to ever reconcile these versions of memory. Intolerance for this or the idea that it represents some form of gaslighting is pernicious concept creep. It makes us harder to live with each other, to understand each other’s differences.

But oppressive structures are pervasive and deeply internalized. Delineating a line between what is and what is not abuse is a difficult project and perhaps not always a worthwhile one. There are regular examples of harm, after all, that may not be abuse. We harm each other routinely. To be close to others requires some amount of self-effacement, a willingness to recognize that your version of reality may in fact intrude at times on someone else’s and damage them in ways that are hard to accept. Jameson comes to the realization and encourages us in turn to realize that many instances of what we might call gaslighting is an inevitable aspect of intimate relationships and may not be motivated by evil. But that doesn’t undo other larger dynamics. Usually gaslighting relies not only on one person’s subjective reality, into which they inculcate the other person, but also on broader shared ideas which may be inherently at odds with our lived experience but to which we are nonetheless encouraged to conform.

Jameson tries to reframe gaslighting away from romantic relationships and towards other kinds of intimate relationships, like parents and children. I wondered though, as I was reading the piece, about other kinds of relationships where gaslighting might figure. At school, at work, in dynamics of mentorships or collaboration or friendship.

Have you ever been gaslit at work? You might think not. But many routine forms of workplace abuse probably come closer to gaslighting than some of Jameson’s examples. Have you ever tried to claim overtime and been penalized for failing to simply perform your work within regular business hours? Have you ever been underpaid in comparison to someone performing the same role for no perceivable reason, such as structural discrimination? Have you ever complained about labor violations or tried to free yourself from a bad job or to claim benefits to which you were entitled and been told that you have violated the trust of what, in essence, used to be a family?

Perhaps it is less that we are newly unable to tolerate intimacy and more that these structural dynamics, these oppressive systems, have increasingly crept into our personal lives. That we are increasingly dependent on the whims of wealthy financiers to survive. That the structures that make up our society are increasingly decrepit and unable to meet our basic needs. That violent right wing conspiracy theories have taken deep root not only in our government but also concealed on social media under vehicles of wellness, safety, and news, where they inculcate us unwillingly. That many of us are increasingly tied to archaic family structures with the rollback of reproductive rights, soaring rents, and widespread disregard for domestic violence and abuse. Perhaps the world seems more untrustworthy to the very young because it really is more untrustworthy. Who are we to deny them that?