alexandra naughton

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ON GASLIGHT (1944)

“You’re not going out of your mind, you’re slowly and systematically being driven out of your mind.”

It’s a bizarre ordeal to watch a movie you loved as a child with a new awareness, with the lived experience and familiarity of the issues being explored by the fictional characters onscreen. The magic goes away and, in my case, instead of the memories of feeling cool and grownup at slumber parties showing friends an “old movie,” the main character is now a mirror and it almost hurts to watch. I think it’s important to do this though, to revisit beloved cinema with the maturity to appreciate it in a different way.

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