TNBA reviews: Growing Pains

Growing Pains assumes the gravitas of a feature-length film through its economical storytelling that subsumes temporally condensed, but emotionally charged sequences that tacitly fill in narrative gaps and wipes that elide all that is unnecessary with greater efficiency than straight cuts or dissolves. Growing Pains has neither the time nor artistic license for lengthy introspection or extended lyricism, but in its watercolor backgrounds and midpoint interludes that distill a humble social awareness it comes close to the poetry of the very best youth films by Nicholas Ray and Dennis Hopper, and echoes them thematically in its handling of muddled father/son relationships and in its inevitable convergence on catastrophe.

The premise is that Robin has become obsessed with a lost, amnesiac girl tentatively dubbed Annie out of a combination of pity, empathy, and teenage romance. Dini and Goodman do little to mollify her straits, starting the episode out with a biker convoy of would-be rapists who encircle her in an alleyway and bait her with degrading come-ons. Robin comes to her rescue in a triumphant sequence of adolescent valor that immediately dissolves into awkward intrigue for her. That Annie’s confused loneliness corresponds to Robin’s own murky childhood as a mobster’s son and that Robin is for a rare moment alone in his actions as a savior immediately conjures expectations for romance, or at the very least deeply involved friendship, and these expectations are immediately dashed by a signal from Batman roughly akin to a sudden tug on a dog leash. As in Never Fear, Batman is a domineering, unsympathetic and constrictive father figure that has multiple unflattering parallels in the story. Robin is the only one of the two seeming to carry a spark of basic human feeling for Annie, who is filtered almost completely out of Batman’s radar of more pressing priorities.

Robin’s nocturnal trek through the ruination of Gotham’s poverty-stricken sectors, arriving soon after Annie is revealed to have a father (in a riveting sequence at a bus station that utilizes intersecting lines of both architecture and processions of people to characterize Annie’s frantic aloneness), is the centerpiece that, in a unique instance, encourages time for reflective pause. For all of the cartoon archetypes that Annie fulfills, especially those attributable to anime, Dini and Goodman are earnest about making us believe her as a human being, and these somber observations of poor people thematically associated with Annie and strewn about crumbling tenements do wonders to evoke the kind of lamentation one would only expect to find in more challenging works of art.

The irony of the lengths the writers go to make Annie feel more human than the rest of our cast is that she isn’t human at all. Though it may be a disappointment to some that the plot takes a turn for the fantastical when the story seemed so focused on real-life issues, the revelation that Annie’s father is Clayface escalates the drama exponentially, raising relevant and almost unanswerable questions of ethics that make the proposed antagonist a man of justifiable principle and Robin, the proposed protagonist, at a loss for how to reconcile his gut-feelings to a sadly mixed-up reality that can’t quite account for his easy solutions. We agree with him in his beliefs that Annie deserves to be treated as a human being and Clayface as a monster, and yet neither one can be successfully argued with any degree of closure.

The paroxysmal finale in which Clayface reabsorbs Annie, whom we find was merely an extension of his will before she blacked out and became autonomous, not only pays homage to Akira and its ending of similarly self-destructive elemental chaos, but also stands as the DCAU’s definitive moment of moral limbo. The boundaries that govern the definition of murder and the rights of an organism (and this counts for both Annie and Clayface) are blurred irrevocably, resulting in a denouement of grown-up frustration that marks both a coming-of-age story in the best sense and an indelible sign of maturity in a series currently undergoing a watershed period of boundary-pushing and rediscovery.