How apt that a story about sight requires some close scrutiny in order to be understood.
The real impetus of this movie occurs in the details. Some random examples:
*Lucas' name means "light."
*The pattern on his pajamas resembles prison stripes, perhaps symbolizing the entrapment and immobility that he fears from impending blindness.
*The dual nature of the knitting needle--a)descriptions like 'sharp' and 'penetrating' apply to its function as well as to a person's insightful abilities, and b)the veiled sexual reference of the act of stabbing as a displacement for the impotence Lucas feels, both in losing his sight as well as for the basic powerlessness of childhood.
*He sees through a telescope/he calls his knitting needle a telescope...telescopes are supposed to bring the distant object close, but they also fold inward on themselves, a diminution of what they were. They reveal, and then they collapse.
*The color blue, mostly missing from the film's palette, is used mainly for tiny details like picture frames (something which contains our visions...rather like Lucas' eyeglass frames contain his actual vision); a cabinet (also something which contains, even locks up, and can withhold its contents from view as opposed to putting them on display); the baby sister's beautiful blue eyes, praised even as Lucas' eyes are ever more distorted through his lenses; the knitting his mother makes for the baby, surely an unusual color for a female infant--but is it really blue or has Lucas completely lost sight of reality by now? Even his demeanor is "blue" as he becomes increasingly more detached, both from reality and from the people and events around him.
His detachment is partly a result of his confusion. He can hardly see, and what he thinks he sees, he can't trust. Therefore, his responses to people become odd and then almost nonexistent. For the most part he stops reacting to them. He is in the process of disappearing from his own life. The world is becoming invisible, and so, it seems, shall he.
He further detaches from the world around him as people remain blind to his bizarre inner landscape and the worries besetting him. There is a lovely dichotomy in the scene where he is across the street from the wedding crowd. Without his thick lenses, the people appear to be ineffectually stabbing about with canes and dark glasses. When he puts his lenses back on, the people look normal. They can't see when he can't see, but they can when he can. One of his fears is that the world will be as uncomprehending of him as it will be incomprehensible to him, when he is blind.
There is also the fear that other senses aren't to be trusted. Notice the scene where Toby is trying to get in the window: the squeeching of the soapy rag against the glass blends with the dog's eager whines until the noises and suds somehow become the signs of a crazed, foaming beast. The deterioration of Lucas' senses and the destruction of what he loves become one and the same.
No wonder this is a terrified little boy. And if he can be impelled by his dark visions to kill Toby, whom he loves, what might he do to baby Tess who is, at the very least, an object of ambivalence? Interesting that the name Tess means 'harvester' or 'reap.' To reap is to glean (a common synonym for comprehension, as in "what can you glean from this situation?"). It is to collect, to gather--also terms for pulling oneself together. A harvester is productive, someone who expedites growth (crops in the field) into sustenance (grain for the bread), just as the emergence of baby Tess brings about the full flowering of Lucas' fears, feeding them to the point of his fateful act.
Tess is the final catalyst, personifying the loss that Lucas so dreads. He has lost big sister Rose to marriage and eventual motherhood, his parents to their absorption with the baby, his pal Toby is dead, his grip on reality is loosening, and he is losing his vision and with it, his freedom. For all he knows he could even lose his life in the impending eye operation. All this loss solidifies in the diminutive image of Tess. The periphery of his world has narrowed until the only focus is this new little baby who hasn't seen anything yet, and so he takes her. To preserve her? To show her his view of the world? To make her the repository of his last vision? Or for something more sinister? At this point the action is pretty ambiguous. I can't tell what his intentions are, and maybe he can't, either. However, in looking at the clues provided in the names (father Frank, means forthright, let's-be-frank; mother Miriam, biblical namesake protects the boy Moses; sister Rose, roses signify purity, love; brother-in-law Tony, means 'praiseworthy'; Lucas and Tess, lucidity and reaper) I tend to think a positive outcome is intended all along.
It is a nice moment at the end when Lucas tells the nurse, "I like to look," whereas before, looking had become a frightful, confusing exercise. He watches her knitting needles as shadow puppets on the wall, but instead of something horrific they are just...knitting needles. Nothing more. Real is real.
That's how I see it, anyway. Someone else might have a different interpretation. I have to love a movie that lends itself to alternate views.
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