Just listen to the first five minutes of the historic miniseries Gaslit to capture the tone. This reconstruction of the Watergate affair, seen from inside the offices of Republican power, will be raw, vulgar and as grotesque as the protagonists – starting with G. Gordon Liddy, the architect of the screwed up illegal wiretapping operation at Democratic Party headquarters — about the scandal that prompted President Nixon to resign in 1974.
The story is famous, but the creator of the series, Robbie Pickering (to whom we owe the excellent dystopian thriller Mr Robot with Sam Esmail, executive producer of Gaslit), pays particular attention to the role of the wife of Attorney General John Mitchell (count a few seconds before recognizing a transfigured Sean Penn!), the colorful Martha Mitchell, nicknamed in the American media ” The Mouth of the South », Interpreted by a Julia Roberts who burns the screen in each of her scenes.
Forgotten element of this whole affair, Martha Mitchell, who loves the media attention and does not hide her opposition to the Vietnam War, will be held captive by the security agents hired by her husband, occasionally beaten and voluntarily cut off from the world, lest she reveal the involvement of President Nixon’s re-election committee in the case. From twist to twist, this entertaining series reveals a rotten culture of partisan political commitment which, unfortunately, echoes the current context in this America launched on the road to mid-term elections.
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