The Red Tree
The Gable Film
Excerpt from Jonathan S. Slater’s “Long-Distance Parallels? Rhode Island’s Red Tree and the Michigan Dogman” (from Mythopoesis and Cryptozoology, edited by Hamilton Marx; Estuary Press, 2011):
One of the most tantalizing and poorly addressed aspects of Crowe’s “novel” is the film which she describes in the final chapter, when the author finally breaks down and discusses the events surrounding the suicide of her lover. Crowe herself admits that she’s uncertain whether she awoke and saw part of an actual film that night, or if, instead, she’s recalling a dream born of a drunken stupor. Regardless, I’ve discussed the problem with almost twenty film scholars, and not one of them can identify any scene in any film matching that described by Crowe:
On the TV, a young woman stared out a window. She was watching another woman who seemed about the same age as herself and who was sitting in a tire swing hung from a very large tree. It was almost exactly like the swing my grandfather put up for me and my sister when I was a kid. Just an old tire and a length of rope suspended from a low, sturdy branch. From the angle of the shot, it was clear that the window looking out on the tree was also looking down. I mean, that it must have been a second-story window. Or an attic window. The woman in the tire wasn’t swinging. She was just sitting there. There was no dialog, and no musical score, either. There was nothing but the sound of wind blowing. The woman watching from the window leaned forward, resting her forehead against the glass. With an index finger, she traced the shape of a heart on the windowpane. And then I realized that there was something approaching the tree. It came very slowly, and by turns I thought I was seeing a bear, a wolf, a dog, and a man crawling forward on his hands and knees. Whatever it was, the woman in the swing didn’t see it, but I had the distinct impression that the woman watching from the window did. After a bit, she turned away, stepping out of frame, so that there was only the window, the tree, the woman in the swing, and the whatever it might have been slowly coming up behind her.
It has been pointed out that the scene bears a slight resemblance to a segment from Ridley Scott and Albert Perrault’s unfinished Court of the Sidhe, noted by filmthreat.com as one of the “Top Ten Lost Films of All Time.” However, a far more striking parallel has already been pointed out by a number of online cryptozoology buffs, who’ve recognized a strong resemblance between Sarah Crowe’s mystery film and a short clip known as the “Gable Film.”
My purpose here is not to debate the authenticity of the “Gable Film.” To speak bluntly, I find it patently absurd that anyone would ever accept this clip as anything but an obvious (if admittedly disquieting) hoax. It makes the Patterson Bigfoot film look like High Art. My purpose is, rather, to draw attention to the similarity between this clip and the film that Crowe describes. Could Crowe have seen the “Gable Film,” then unconsciously incorporated it into a nightmare the night of her girlfriend’s death? Certainly, at first glance, this scenario seems extremely plausible. And, too, it is worth noting that the “Gable Film” makes its first appearance (online) on September 23, 2007, and the suicide of Crowe’s lover takes place on February 8, 2008. So, from the standpoint of chronology, it is at least feasible that the “Gable Film” might have served as the seed of Sarah Crowe’s imagined film of a young woman in a swing, oblivious to “… a bear, a wolf, a dog, and a man crawling forward on his hands and knees...slowly coming up behind her.”
Excerpt from interview with Allan H. Fielding, folklorist and sociologist, conducted by Jane Tierney during “Beyond Citizenship: Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging” conference, July 2010, Birkbeck, University of London:
Fielding: Yeah, sure. Sure, it’s a creepy song [“Legend” by Steve Cook], In a ham-fisted, hillbilly way, it’s a creepy song. You look at Cook’s lyrics, which seem to have started so much of that whole Michigan Dogman furor, and, for that matter, probably instigated the “Gable Film” hoax, and you see a lot of commonality with the events purported to have occurred at “the Old Wight Place” in Moosup Valley. And in other parts of Rhode Island, near Crowe’s “red tree.” And this is what I find so fascinating, right? In 1987, a small-town radio exec records a song loosely based on local traditions of a man-wolf, and, a posteriori, afterwards, all these reports of just such a creature start pouring into the radio station. In 2008, Sarah Crowe goes to that house in the woods, and she finds Harvey’s manuscript, which leads her to that damned tree, And she begins to experience the sorts of phenomenon that Harvey’s reporting. The folklore, or, perhaps I should say fakelore, becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, in both cases. But, yeah, I’m not saying it’s not a creepy song. That one line, “Seven years passed with the turn of the century, they say a crazy old widow had a dream, of dogs that circled her house at night that walked like men and screamed.” I think that’s how it goes. Almost sounds like something Sarah Crowe might have written, doesn’t it? Or her lunatic avatar, “Charles Harvey.” Or, hell, Charles Fort.
Excerpt from interview with Lindsey Morgenstern, author of The Goblin at the Window and Other American Hauntings (2011), Strange Incursions Press, Milwaukee:
It’s practically impossible not to compare the “Gable Film” with the mystery film described by Sarah Crowe in the book’s final chapter, especially in the absence of any other point of comparison. To date, no other likely candidate has emerged that could account for the film she claims to have seen the night after [sic] the suicide. It simply does not exist. But the “Gable Film” does. Occam’s Razor demands we draw this connection, or completely deny the obvious.
Excerpt from “The Girl at the Window, the Girl in the Swing,” (from Broken Walls: Discussions on the Origins and Consequences of Metafiction and Metatheatre, edited by Alva Ariel Bakhtin; MIT Press, 2012):
Here, it’s plain that Crowe is playing at semantics. Consider her placement of the phrase, “second-story,” for example, and its relevance to the structure of The Red Tree as a whole. Indeed, the author almost goes so far as to show her hand, as if she fears the reader won’t be clever enough to keep up with the complex literary Matryoshka doll she’s created.