The Gothicism of American Gothic--"Inhumanitas"

[For the previous entry, click here.]


American Gothic certainly justifies its show title with this fourteenth episode.  "Inhumanitas" opens with Sheriff Lucas Buck and Father Tilden sitting in a church confessional.  Lucas, though, isn't there to articulate his various transgressions but to learn of the secret sins of Trinity's populace.  Father Tilden dishes the dirt on the townspeople, citing incidents of petty theft, unwanted pregnancy, and marital infidelity.  Lucas seeks
"something [he] can use" in his personal dealings with the locals, and gets a surprisingly juicy tidbit when Tilden confides that Barbara Hudson puts nails in the street to keep cars from speeding by her house.

Corrupt religious figures are a familiar character type in Gothic narratives, and Tilden ties in to that tradition based on the bargain he has made with the devilish Lucas.  In return for snitching on the penitent, Tilden gets the assurance that no harm will come to his church (which, as the sheriff recounts during their conversation in the confessional, has been "miraculously" spared from damage by a wildfire that ravaged the rest of the buildings on that block). 

Macabre rendition of religious icons is another hallmark of the Gothic, and in this opening scene viewers watch a church statue come to life and take on the visage of Merlyn Temple.  Merlyn has turned avenging angel in the hopes of saving her brother Caleb's soul from Lucas.

Later in the episode, Lucas snuffs the life out of a Scripture-spouting Tilden by squeezing the crucifix from a set of the priest's rosary beads in his fist.  Tilden's desperate prayer and the lack of protection provided by Christianity's primary symbol is reminiscent of the scene from the film version of Salem's Lot when Father Callahan is thwarted by the vampire Barlow.

Echoes of Psycho: as part of Merlyn's terror campaign against the sheriff, she turns the water in his lover Selena's shower bloody (the image of the dark fluid circling down the drain is unmistakably Hitchcockian).

As Lucas works his latest scheme against Barbara's husband Brian, he remarks (perhaps only half-jokingly) that the man could remove an unwanted tenant on his land by dismembering his body and burying him in the cellar--a course of action with which the narrators of certain Edgar Allan Poe stories would no doubt approve.

The episode's most ominous note, though, is struck during the climactic confrontation between Lucas and Merlyn.  The sheriff boasts of the dark power latent in his son Caleb, and warns that if he (Lucas) is killed, his evil spirit will flow straight inside the boy.  "The child becomes the man," and the Gothic theme of terrible inheritance is accordingly given a frightening twist.