The Gothicism of American Gothic: "A Tree Grows in Trinity"

[For previous entry, click here.]


The second episode of the series draws on a pair of Gothic hallmarks: fearful flight and cruel imprisonment.  "A Tree Grows in Trinity" picks up where the series premiere left off: with Caleb on the run from Sheriff Lucas Buck (after setting his own house on fire to escape him).  Caleb's desperate exodus leads him first into a cornfield, where he almost collides with a decidedly devilish scarecrow.

Eventually Caleb hides out in an abandoned hunting lodge, but is shocked to find that the place is already occupied.  What at first seems a monstrous figure is actually a tied-up, traumatized man.  As the episode unfolds, viewers learn that this is Rafael Santo, a Miami reporter who has been missing for months after coming to Trinity to investigate the "Bermuda Triangle of tourism."  He is now held captive in the lodge after running afoul of Lucas.  Perhaps even worse, he serves as the personal sex slave for the sheriff's lascivious sidekick Selena.

Coroner Curtis Webb is engaged by Lucas to perform a rudimentary autopsy of Caleb's sister Merlyn (and to ignore the evidence that the girl died at the sheriff's hand).  The ghostly Merlyn, though, opposes such machinations, dubbing Webb's tape recordings with the message "Someone's at the door."  She also freaks out the coroner when her corpse's head (now wide-eyed and turned to the side) somehow appears out from under the sheet that had been covering it.  Merlyn's final touch is the bloody injunction scrawled on the autopsy room door: "Don't bury the truth."

Buck later expresses his displeasure with the coroner's handling of the autopsy by leaving the severed head of Webb's pet goat Eli inside the refrigerator stationed on the front porch of the family
home--a sinister riff on a memorable scene from The Godfather.

The episode, though, best lives up to the show's title in the scene where Caleb spies a pair of cemetery caretakers arranging the wooden markers at the graves of his father and sister.  Teapot and her daddy Harlan are quintessential hicks, in both costume and demeanor.  Harlan jokes about the adjacent burials ("Just because he killed her don't mean they can't share the same worms"), and the chortling, overalls-wearing Teapot teases her daddy about his misspelling on Gage's grave marker ("REST IN PEASE").  American Gothic seems quite conscious of its art-world namesake here, as the figures of Teapot and Harlan could have stepped right out of a Grant Wood painting.  All that's missing from the scene is the iconic hay-fork, and it would be no real surprise (based on the way the series has developed thus far) to see such a tool used pointedly in a future episode.