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“You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.” - Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patankin), The Princess Bride (1987)

The title of Ballers’ (2015) Season One, Episode Eight is “Gaslighting,” but it is unclear if the production team fully grasped the concept. Based on the 1944 movie Gaslight (which was based on the 1938 play Gas Play) for which Ingrid Bergman won the Academy Award for Best Actress, “gaslighting” is the basic idea of one person engaging in deliberately confusing or unexplained behavior in order for another person to start to question their own sanity or perceptions. The Bergman movie takes place in turn of the century London where the houses were lit with gas lamps. If a lamp is turned on anywhere in the house, then all of the other lamps dim. For Bergman’s character, Paula (Ingrid Bergman), the lamps keep dimming but she is alone in the house. She begins to believe she is actually going crazy when, in reality, she is caught up in a deliberate plot by her husband to manipulate Paula into believing she is going insane.

In more modern vernacular, gaslighting is sometimes used to broadly describe dysfunctional relationships where one partner is engaging in deliberately manipulative behavior. Psychologist Robin Stern blogged about it for Psychology Today, based on her book on the subject. Stern describes gaslighting in the context of a relationship with a marked imbalance of power where the more powerful partner attempts to attempts to define the reality of the other person and erode that person’s self confidence.

But, on Ballers, Tracy (Arielle Kebbel) explains it a little differently to Spencer (Dwayne Johnson). She tells him that the reason Angela is blackmailing pro-football player Vernon (Donovan W. Carter) has nothing to do with Vernon and everything to do with how Spencer treated Angela when the two of them dated. Tracy accuses Spencer of ‘gaslighting’ Angela: he treated her well, made her feel like their relationship was important, but then he was cruel and shut off from her emotionally. That definition is clearly a stretch, but it fits with the overall story theme the writers were going for with this episode. Vernon tells Spencer he “feels like he is being watched.” Ricky gives Annabella a large diamond ring, but then fails to commit completely to the relationship and she storms off. Even Joe is desparately wooing Giants’ receiver Victor Cruz in case he needs to part ways with Anderson Financial. All of these characters are in relationships with very unequal power structures. So, while it is a big stretch, the writers are attempting to make that connection with the Gaslight legacy: no one is really on solid ground or feeling too confident in their own abilities to read a situation.

Spencer does manage to wrap up the blackmail business with Angela and, gaslight or not, she turns over the pictures and video. The two part ways on good (and equal) terms.

Even so, the best part of the episode has nothing to do with the gaslight theme: After finding out that his MRI came back clear, Spencer blasts his radio on the way home from the doctor’s office. Seeing Dwayne Johnson rock out to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” is just about enough to make viewers forgive the imprecise application of a classic movie trope.