This chapter explores the political themes in Cavell’s philosophy of cinema by reading the film Gaslight in the context of contemporary American politics. This reading will serve two purposes. First, by focusing on a single film, the chapter demonstrates the political dimension of Cavell’s writing on film. Second in the last few years some critics of Trump have argued that he deploys gaslighting (a term developed from this film) to manipulate the American public. Therefore a reading of Gaslight can provide resources This chapter explores the political themes in Cavell’s philosophy of cinema by reading the film Gaslight in the context of contemporary American politics. This reading will serve two purposes. First, by focusing on a single film, the chapter demonstrates the political dimension of Cavell’s writing on film. Second, in the past few years, some critics of Trump have argued that he deploys “gaslighting” (a term developed from this film) to manipulate the American public. Therefore, a reading of Gaslight can provide resources for contemporary political theorists to think through political deception in contemporary American life. Gaslighting is one of the most powerful forms of political manipulation in the post-truth-politics era because it tricks its targets into doubting what they know. This chapter offers an theoretical analysis of gaslighting. It considers how Cavell’s interpretation of gaslighting as a gendered practice relates to Cavell’s understanding of the gendered nature of skepticism. Cavell suggests that to resist gaslighting one must cultivate modes of response to one’s intuition in order to reclaim one’s voice. The chapter concludes by analyzing how this way of responding to gaslighting can help us to make sense of Trump’s gaslighting of America and similar forms of populist propaganda.

Mailer’s interest in film dates back to his early career, when he went to Hollywood in a failed attempt to work on a screenplay with friend and mentor Jean Malaquais. Despite this failure, Mailer did return to filmmaking in the 1960s, ultimately making Wild 90, Beyond the Law, and Maidstone – three films that exemplify the kind of ambitious experimentation that defines so much of Mailer’s career. None of these films contain what could be considered a straightforward narrative; rather, Mailer instructed his actors to improvise around a theme while he let the camera run, later editing together hours of footage to create a more constrained piece. This chapter discusses Mailer’s journey to make these films, their reception, and the philosophy of cinema that influenced their creation, which Mailer outlines in his essay “Some Dirt in the Talk.”

I posit that it is time to rethink the taxonomic, epistemological and heuristic values of the visual arts by applying magical realism as an interdisciplinary theoretical tool to analyses of cinematic narratives attempting to capture and to relay the ineffable of traumatic memories. Where the written word struggles to recreate a traumatic reality, the visual image artistically insinuates itself as reality. By applying the concept of intermediality to verbal and nonverbal forms of magical realism, the present argument foregrounds the ekphrastic synergy between word (novels and screenplays) and image (films and photographs), and between cinema (words, sounds and images) and other visual media (paintings, photographs, drawings and sculptures). Events that did not register with the psyche at the time of their occurrence may be represented /recreated by the power of suggestion inherent in the magical realist image, in both its verbal and nonverbal forms, as well as in their intermedial hybrids.