MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Leigh Whannell’s 2020 film The Invisible Man, a very loose adaptation of HG Wells’ 1897 novel, is about intimate partner abuse. This is not a subtext; Elisabeth Moss’s Cecilia flees from her wealthy and abusive partner Adrian, and Adrian’s possession of a suit that renders him invisible enables him to find and continue to torment her. Of course, no one believes her. This conference presentation will explore The Invisible Man’s use of invisibility as a representation of the pervasive, long-lasting consequences of abuse as well as a reason that victims may not leave: they do not believe that they can escape.

In recent years, the term “gaslighting” has come into regular use, describing attempts by abusers to manipulate their victim into questioning their own perceptions and sanity; famously, the term originates with the stage play and subsequent film Gaslight. Gaslighting is not the only form of mind game that abusers play with their victims, and The Invisible Man literalizes another form of psychological abuse, that of the victim on some level believing that their abuser has some sort of superhuman power that makes escape impossible. I call this the Kilgrave Effect, after the character of that name in the Marvel tv series Jessica Jones: a textbook abuser with the power to control people’s minds and actions. By creating a character who has actual superpowers that facilitate abuse, Jessica Jones manifests the recognizably irrational but nonetheless controlling fear of abuse victims that they will never be able to escape their abuser. The Invisible Man extends this characterization to include near-superpowers, an invisibility suit that Adrian is able to construct, giving him the means to find and continue to torment Cecilia, abilities that no one believes that he could have.