Being the Ricardos — Who’s Gaslighting Who?

January 17, 2022
Posted by Jay Livingston

The most frequently viewed post on this blog by far is the original one about language anachronisms on “The  Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (here). Google “Maisel anachronism,” and this blog will be near the top of the list.  “Mad Men” too sometimes dotted the1950s landscape with twentieth-century language. (Blog posts are here and here).

This month, television once again took us back to the 1950s with “Being the Ricardos,” and once again the script has language that sounds much too new. We’re not talking about TV fluff where historical precision hardly matters — sitcoms like “The Godldbergs,” set in the 1980s but with a writers’ room stocked with writers who in that decade were barely toddling. But “Being the Ricardos,” written and directed by Aaorn Sorkin, asks to be taken seriously, and Sorkin has a great ear for dialogue.

Yet he gives us this moment in the writers’ room when Madelyn, one of the writers, has suggested a story line that involves Ricky cheating on his taxes. Desi, who is honest about his own taxes, says that his TV character too would never cheat on his taxes. Another writer, Bob, thinks the cheating plot element would work. “It’s very relatable. Everyone does.”

In 1955, things were not “relatable.”  

A few seconds later, Sorkin’s script has this:

Her process? People did not have processes in the 1950s. They just did things the way they did them. They weren’t relatable either. Here are the graphs from Google nGrams, which tallies the frequency of words in books. Both these terms come into wide use only well after the 1950s. True, it takes time for a trendy word to go from everyday talk to a published book, but the lag time is not forty years.

Then there’s gaslighting. Gas as a way of lighting streets and rooms came in around 1800, and that was the gaslight referred to in the 1944 movie, which was set in the late 19th century. Gaslight was a noun. The current usage — as a verb meaning to try to make someone doubt their own true perceptions — didn’t appear until the 21st century.

In “Being the Ricardos,” although Desi does not cheat on his taxes, he may be doing another kind of cheating. Lucy suspects, Desi denies and suggests that she is unreasonably suspicious, that the problem is in her mind.

In the 1950s, people talked about lying and cheating, Men might suggest say their wives were imagining things, might even suggest that they see a psychiatrist, and wives might see all that as a baseless ploy. But nobody called it gaslighting.

Is Sorkin trying to get us to think that 65 years ago people talked about their process and whether something was relatable? Is Sorkin gaslighting us?