The Gothicism of American Gothic: "Triangle"

[For the previous entry, click here.]

This episode of American Gothic could just have easily been titled (with a nod to Ira Levin) "Gail Emory's Baby."  When Gail moves to end her affair with Lucas Buck, and threatens to leave town with her cousin Caleb in tow, the sheriff gives her a supernatural nudge that lands her in the hospital.  There she learns that she is pregnant with Lucas's child.  The subsequent ultrasound furnishes one of the series' creepiest scenes, as the grotesque fetus in the sonogram opens its eyes, turns toward Gail and flashes a demonic grin.

The expectant mother continues to experience disturbing visions concerning the monstrous thing growing inside her.  These could be dismissed as nightmares/hallucinations brought on by Gail's own terror, but mid-episode the viewer learns that Miss Emory isn't just imagining things.  A fiendish conspiracy is in place: the nurse who denies that there is anything abnormal about the fetus pictured in the sonogram is actually lying on Lucas's behalf (the sheriff blackmails her into playing along by threatening to expose her "extracurricular research in the narcotics supply room").

Gail, though, isn't about to take the news of her pregnancy lying down.  She attempts to flee Trinity, but is stymied by the sudden appearance of Lucas on the roadway.  "There's no running from me, you know that," the modern Gothic hero-villain reminds the frightened maiden.

For all of Lucas's entanglement with Gail, he's also hung up on his ex-lover Selena.  And small-town romance begets big-time intrigue when Lucas chafes at Selena and Dr. Billy Peele's relationship.  He gives ominous warnings to both individuals to cease and desist, and when the defiant lovers continue to carry on carnally, Lucas gives Selena a real reason to feel hot and bothered: while in bed with Billy, she is overcome by a 108-degree fever.  Lucas casts the incendiary spell with a strike of a match and a proclamation of "Burn, baby, burn"--words that work not just as a sardonic echo of the Trammps' disco-era classic but as an invocation of the American history of anarchic violence.  

In this episode, American Gothic once again demonstrates its cleverness through the use of background details.  When Gail ponders a suicidal leap from the roof of the local bank, the institution's name shines suggestively behind her: "Trinity Trust," an oxymoron if there ever was one, in this town presided over by a devilish sheriff and riddled with dirty secrets and unholy bargains.