#0444

how does squinting even work anyway?

Good tidings to you, @brutalite!

Well, this is actually similar to the books. In “The Hostile Hospital”, the Baudelaire orphans find a photograph of their parents with Lemony, back when he was still dating Beatrice: 

The first person in the photograph was Jacques Snicket, who waslooking at the photographer and smiling. Standing next to Jacques was a man who was turned away from thecamera, so the children could not see his face, only one of his hands, which was clutching a notebookand pen, as if the obscured man were a writer of some sort. The children had not seen Jacques Snicketsince he was murdered, of course, and the writer appeared to be someone they had never seen at all. Butstanding next to these two people were another two people the Baudelaire children thought they wouldnever see again. Bundled up in long coats, looking cold but happy, were the Baudelaire parents.[The Hostile Hospital, Chapter Seven]

“This photograph must have been taken a long timeago,” Violet said. “Look how much younger they look. They aren’t even wearing their wedding rings.”[The Hostile Hospital, Chapter Eight]

Given the context, it appears that Lemony and beatrice were put in the middle of the picture, as a couple. However Lemony felt the need to hide his face, which meant their relationship wasn’t obvious to the oblivious Baudelaire orphans. Apparently Lemony’s tendancy to hide his face long predates his inculpation for arson. In “All The Wrong Questions”, all the illustrations fail to show his face. In the un-Authorized Autobiography, Lemony can’t find a single photograph of him as a child.

“And on this page,” Violet said, picking up apage I cannot bear to think about, “it reads, "In photographs, and in each public place, Snicket rarelyshows his face.[The Hostile Hospital, Chapter Five]

The Netflix series uses a vastly different continuity and we’ll have to see how it deals with Lemony’s and Beatrice’s break-up. In the books it’s implied they rarely (if ever) saw each other after that because Lemony was on the run (and, later, because she married Bertrand). Perhaps Netflix’s writers have something else in mind because in this picture the Baudelaire parents are clearly holding each other in a romantic manner and Lemony is on the sideline: