#OPAL MEANING TV#

Claire is fantasizing about a good family who supports and care for her, but bc she based it on a billboard across the street, she has to call herself Opal. I thought it was pretty straightforward tbh. They genuinely don’t see her as a person, and it’s likely they see each other in the same way.

It’s sort of heartbreaking: it shows that they aren’t even aware of the ways they’re messing her life up. right in front of the daughter he’s neglecting. He refers to himself as being some little thing that needs to grow. I think the most telling moment in the whole short is with her dad, honestly. She’s the receptacle for their misery, and they drag her down into the mire they’re stuck in, the hell they can’t escape. They treat her like an extension of themselves, as the solution to their problems, rather than as an independent person who deserves respect and who has her own dreams.

Claire becomes the thing that they’re all missing: she’s the eyes with which her grandpa can find his cigarettes, the “face” of her father insofar as he uses her to shape his self image, and the pill that will fix all of her mother’s problems. This is further enforced in the ending sequence. “Mama needs a baby girl to hold her hair.”

#OPAL MEANING TV#

The dad obviously sees her as nothing but an audience, someone to behold him and sympathize with his problems grandpa talks about how she’s just like the people on TV insofar as she’s “far more interested in than anything got going on in life” and mom’s entire song is about using her daughter as a crutch for her addiction. The way I see it, all three of Claire’s family members are ultimately self-centered in a manner that leaves them exploiting her and treating her as an extension of themselves.

Opal meaning