‘Unbroken’: Gaslighting from all directions

Publicity image for “Unbroken”

The 2021 German television series “Unbroken” is rightly called a thriller. It’s a story about gaslighting.

Almost every time I read the word “gaslighting” I have to look it up. I remember it comes from a movie, but I can’t remember the plot, the characters or the actors. I’ve blanked it out. The metaphor doesn’t make an obvious connection between the object – a streetlight – and the psychological phenomenon. Is my blindness to the metaphor a defensive reaction, a method of ignoring whatever threat it presents to my confidence about what I know and don’t know? Does it illustrate a willingness to doubt, a deep-seeded and useful skepticism? Or am I just losing my memory? Or my mind?

I’ve looked it up again. Wikipedia says, “Gaslighting is a colloquialism, defined as manipulating someone into questioning their own perception of reality. The expression, which derives from the title of the 1944 film Gaslight, became popular in the mid-2010s. Merriam-Webster calls it “deception of one's memory, perception of reality, or mental stability.” (Or at least it says that today, the day I’m writing this; it might be different tomorrow; maybe someone is manipulating it, or me.)

Something like gaslighting is what the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah (2018) thinks shapes racial and color identity, limiting our individual possibilities. Our identity – our identification with certain ways of acting or being – can become “the lies that bind.” The term broke into a squabble about what it means for leaders or organizations to be authentic (Alvesson & Einola, 2022; Gardner & McCauley, 2022).

In “Unbroken,” a production of ZDF Studios, we spend six hours (or three months in real time, if anything is real) with a detective who has lost her memory. Her name is Alexandra Enders (played by Aylin Tezel), that much she remembers, and that she is a cop. Alex’s brain may be addled, but her muscle memory is good. She’s a martial arts specialist. We don’t need to know which type or types. What’s important for the story is this: She can defend herself. She’s unbreakable, at least physically.

As the series starts, she’s nearly nine months pregnant but still on the chase after bad guys. One of them is in the back seat of her car, wearing a balaclava. They struggle. She’s not an easy person to subdue. She pulls the key out of the ignition and stabs his hand. He recoils but then comes back again, grabbing a cloth with chloroform to knock her out. It’s a scene she relives repeatedly, in memory. We saw it, too, but from her point of view. Did it happen at all?

Six days later she emerges from the woods outside Duisburg, with blood-stained clothes and no shoes, alone, and crucially no longer pregnant. She can’t remember what happened. Her (all-male) colleagues are – like all males? – not very sympathetic when she returns to work, early, but her boss lets her pursue a case of a woman, possibly an illegal immigrant, found dead, murdered? The detective first senses, then discovers, that the victim isn’t the prostitute all her (male) colleagues presume she is. No, she’s a mother who recently gave birth to a child. Who is, like Alex’s own child … where?

Alex’s husband wants to help her cope with despair, but she won’t let him. Instead, she goes to the gym to train with a guy who is, what, an ex-boyfriend? He is someone who can give her a good workout, in more ways than one.

The detective’s father used to head up the department. He’s retired now and has dementia. He is losing his mind, no doubt about it. His protégé, Paul Nowak (Özgür Karadeniz) is now the boss of the old boss’s daughter, and he’s as close as it comes to someone showing sympathy. But he has a past he would like to forget and can’t. As the story of the victim unfolds – a Romanian woman, a surrogate mother who doesn’t want to let go of her newborn – Nowak is a little too quick to say case closed. Alex Enders discovers – no, senses, then uncovers – that there are other cases of missing babies. There have been for years.

One by one, the other guys in the cop-shop begin to think that their kick-boxing colleague is on to something, but then they fall away from that view as her behavior grows increasingly erratic. The police department’s resident psychiatrist – the only other female character of note – tries to talk her down, back to more rational ways of working, back to thinking rather than feeling her way from facts to truth claims, using logic not wild, imaged theories. The psychiatrist succeeds, for a while.

Gradually, as evidence mounts, they all become convinced that Alex is having a meltdown. Alex does too.

Gaslighting, in this story, as in the 1944 movie and all the stories that adopt the model, is manipulative. But this one suggests something that gaslighting can be more than that. It’s an infectious, socially transmitted mental disorder. It makes (almost) everyone doubt (almost) everything they think they know.

This series has a lot of twists I won’t relate. The puzzle they present – built upon the expectations of the form, the dynamics of plot interacting with characters – means that we, the viewers, yearn for sense, for resolution, for a solution. Does that come? Watch it for yourself and find out.

This show thrills, even if it seems a little too perfectly messy. It places value more on intuition than evidence or argument. But as you watch, think about how practices other than evil manipulation can lead to limiting our potential – the stereotyping by others, which leads us to accept a static view of the self – can break our will to achieve more, or willingness to change. Is Alex the only person who is being gaslit? Can we gaslight ourselves?

!Alvesson, M., & Einola, K. (2022). The gaslighting of authentic leadership 2.0. Leadership, 18(6), 814-831. doi:10.1177/17427150221125271

Appiah, K. A. (2018). The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. London: Profile Books.

Gardner, W. L., & McCauley, K. D. (2022). The gaslighting of authentic leadership revisited. Leadership, 18(6), 832-840. doi:10.1177/17427150221111635