After writing a story with Alan's view of Thomas, I wanted to do a story with Thomas's view of Alan... although in the event that ended up being a very small part of it :-)
One of the things I did like about the film (among the many bits that annoyed me!) was the way that Thomas 'breaks Edith's heart' by criticising her writing. Not by betraying her in any of the normal ways, but by telling her the painful truth about the one thing in which she prides herself — and I think it probably is the truth, judging by what we know of her and what we see from first-time writers of a similar age on FFnet. Edith knows nothing of romance beyond what she has read (and her inexperienced and half-acknowledged feelings for Thomas); she has set out to shoehorn a love plot into her 'ghost story' at the publisher's suggestion, and at this point she has almost certainly done it by resorting to every cliché and euphemistic flight of purple prose to which she has ever been exposed. Thomas, on the other hand, knows all too well just how complex, visceral and painfully destructive love can be — and by the end of the film, so does Edith. But at this stage in her writing career, it's entirely probable that she is writing superficial, derivative and totally unrealistic material where romance is concerned... and its being true makes the criticism hurt so much the worse. That was completely unexpected, and it rang very true as a piece of psychology.
One of the things that didn't seem to make sense about the film, when I tried to look at it from Thomas's own point of view rather than from Edith's, was the question of what on earth — if he genuinely did love Edith, and it seems he did — he thought he was doing by marrying her in the first place. I mean, however complicit he was in Lucille's actions he had to have realised by this point that marrying him was tantamount to a death sentence for any woman; marrying women he didn't love for the sake of the money he desperately needed was one thing, but what did he think was going to happen to Edith if he won her hand? There was clearly some fairly confused thinking going on...
So I thought it would be interesting to suggest that when he does it, he is consciously trying to 'do the right thing' — to save her from himself, and from the fate that he must, on some level, know will await her if he allows himself the indulgence of marrying her. (In fact, when you look at it, the only way that you can make Thomas an at all sympathetic character — and the film clearly intends us to see him that way — is to assume from the hints in the script that he doesn't allow himself to think of the past or the future any more than he can help.)
Lucille is central to his life: she is the leader and he the follower, the devoted lieutenant who owes her everything. Another thing about the film that struck me as unexpected and welcome was that even at the end, when he finally finds the courage to rebel against Lucille for Edith's sake, what he lets slip is that his vision of happiness involves not being free from his sister's bed but having them both — not the 'Hollywood-perfect' ending one would expect, but one that's oddly credible.
But Thomas is not a very strong character, and he's not good at resisting temptation; when Lucille more or less throws Edith into his lap by force of circumstances, he starts rationalising away his renunciation and telling himself that somehow things will magically work out all right :-(
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