Main Character Energy: Adolescence / "Almost Got 'Im"

Batman: The Animated Series, season 1, episode 46

In this post, I continue on with some personal writing I’ve been working on in therapy, a sort of memoir that centers on me learning to tell my own story in a clear-eyed but positive way, with the help of some of the most impactful media in my life. I’m posting entries from that work here every so often. I’m sharing because I put a lot of effort into it, and because it feels like a good thing to do if I’m trying to feel more at home with my own narrative. Pre-posting edits will be made if it feels appropriate, and identifying information of others will be obscured except where it’s impossible (e.g. “mom” and “dad” — not a lot of room for ambiguity there!). If you want to skip these posts, it’s all gravy, baby!

I can tell you the exact day my dad walked out on my mom and I. Not because I have some kind of Marilu Henner-esque recall for calendar dates, but because it was the night that Batman: The Animated Series premiered on Fox. The show was doing a Sunday evening pre-Simpsons sneak preview before its regular weekday slot would begin the next day, and as a ravenous devourer of all superhero-related media, I was excited.

Somehow, it felt like I already knew that Batman would bring some kind of seismic shift, serving as a key demarcation point in the evolution of animation. There was something in the air, or maybe in all the newspaper and magazine articles my parents had shared with me leading up to the show’s launch, that made it feel so obvious that Batman would be special. And, man, it was. Although the media analyst in me now can see the seeds of Batman’s revolution planted in other shows, notably Warner Bros’ sister production Tiny Toon Adventures, it feels hard to understate the fact that on September 6, 1992, children’s animation grew up.

As it happens, so did I.

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Things at home had never been what I’d call “peaceful.” A word I’m going to keep coming back to is “resentment,” because I feel like that emotion charged the air in our home with a lot of Midwestern nastiness. There wasn’t necessarily a ton of yelling, but boy was there a lot of sniping, complaining, passive-aggressiveness, and straight up disrespect. A story that has stuck with me is how one day, our dog Asta decided it would be fun to sequester a bunch of her food in my dad’s work shoes. My dad discovered this upon trying to get out the door, and his reaction was to dump the dog food all over the floor in the entryway. He then turned to my mom and said something like “the dog and the house are your responsibility, so you can clean this up.” I think nowadays, we’d call that kind of behavior “abuse”. Back then, it was just Being a Man (™).

I suppose hot water can only simmer for so long before it boils over (is that true? Let’s say it’s true¹). My dad was clearly unhappy, my mom felt trapped (more on that later), and I was just coasting along thinking that this was how everybody did it. I didn’t really understand what it meant to want more, beyond material possessions. More toys? Hell yeah. To change one’s station in life? Literally could not even conceive of it. But the adults in the room could.

My dad had been sleeping around for years – maybe the whole time, maybe I’m even a child of his infidelities². My mom was clearly not what he wanted. I don’t know enough of their story to say why, but I know that this must be true. And so, the afternoon of Sunday, September 6, on one of our regular trips to the gym (this was about the only thing we did together as father and son), he pulled me aside to ask me how I would feel if he had to leave the house. Something wasn’t working for him at home, so he’d get his own place where I could come visit, and do things just me and dad (an upgrade in father-son time from what we currently had). It would be liberating for him, and it could be fun for me, too! I can’t remember the words he used, but I distinctly remember his tone – cautious excitement. For him, this was a huge opportunity. He couldn’t wait to go.

I have to say, at 8 years old, I didn’t really understand what was going on here. All my Main Character brain could process was that it might be cool to have a second place to go play, and since my dad felt excited, this probably was good, right? He said it was good. So in my head I’m like, cool, tonight I can watch Batman AND my dad gets to do something that makes him happy that maybe leads to more fun for me down the line. But even that afternoon, I knew there was something about the situation I couldn’t quite grasp – some heaviness that lay out of my emotional reach.

I have no idea what my day was like between that visit to the gym and the actual walkout. I have to imagine that the excitement for Batman helped power me through the bizarre situation that my dad put me in. I know he told me not to say anything to mom, but how did I last through our final family dinner without making some weird little comment? A mystery, man.

And then the time came. I think we were, like, half an hour from Batman beginning when it happened. Again, I don’t fully remember the sequence of events, but I think it went something like this – my dad had a military green suede duffel bag packed, and he brought it downstairs and dropped it on the floor of the entryway, almost carelessly, like it was dog food. He made a grand proclamation: “Denys, I’m leaving.” He said he was going to sleep in his office for a few nights while he found an apartment. He left a contact number and told my mom that they would talk about what to do about me. Then he left, and my mom cried and cried.

It really sends up red flags when people say stuff about themselves like “I’m so empathic,” so please understand that I don’t love what I’m about to say, but it’s sort of the only way I can make sense of this – suddenly, seeing how this dramatic exit rocked my mom, I started sobbing. I was trepidatiously excited earlier, but now I felt positively broken. I must have been using my parents’ emotions towards this split as my guiding light. Or maybe I just didn’t understand how something would feel until it actually happened to me? Is that part of trauma? I don’t know, but my mom and I spent the whole night in tears trying to figure out what was next, how we could go on. And I did not watch Batman that evening.

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As I mentioned in my last entry, a key fact about the cartoons of the 1980s is that they existed to be half-hour toy commercials. That’s not to say that the people creating them didn’t care, but, like, job #1 for most of those guys was to sell the toys of the characters on screen. For the entirety of the post-deregulation ‘80s, that was the model. You were lucky to get folks who invested more of their own creativity than they needed to into that enterprise – folks like Robert Lamb, the storyboard artist who followed his thought of “wouldn’t it be cool if…” into crafting one of the most interesting and sensitive toy commercials of the ‘80s, “Into the Abyss”. Or folks like Paul Dini, then a fresh animation writer, who first inserted the plotline of the Sorceress being Teela’s mother into Masters of the Universe, which “Into the Abyss” picked up on to deliver its surprising emotional punch at the end.

After about a decade of this toyetic focus, something shifted – as it tends to do when we look at the cyclicality of media. Driven by Warner Bros. Animation, which had teamed up with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, the early ‘90s saw cartoons more fully embrace the medium’s roots in storytelling. It’s not that toy sales weren’t a factor anymore, but Spielberg and the WB seemingly set out to make shows for kids that cared about story first. What if you could sell toys… by making art that was genuinely very good?

And so, a year after Tiny Toon Adventures (the first Spielberg-WB collaboration) hit the scene, Batman: The Animated Series came out of the darkness – a superhero cartoon partially inspired by the success of Tim Burton’s feature films that wanted to trust kids with relatively mature, emotional, sharply structured stories that centered a man dressed as a bat. Except “centered” isn’t really the right word for how the show presents Batman.

Indeed, Batman: The Animated Series has an interesting relationship to its main character. Largely speaking, Batman is not the star of his show. Rather, he acts as a relatively static narrative slate against which to explore the stories of the colorful characters around him. This sort of storytelling existed in superhero DNA since comic pioneer Will Eisner’s Spirit strips of the 1940s, and it persists today in shows like Poker Face (Charlie isn’t technically a superhero, but she does have a super power, so). Really, this is the same tactic taken by police procedurals, except procedurals generally focus on a whole cast of characters – an institution working through its machinations towards justice. Like the Spirit and Charlie Cale, Batman is a singular main character who exists outside the law, fascinating enough to be the center of his own narrative. In Batman: The Animated Series, he just… isn’t.

The most obvious and yet most compelling example I can pull here is the episode “Almost Got ‘Im,” which so consistently tops lists of the best episodes of the show that it almost feels unfair to talk about. But I genuinely think that “Almost Got ‘Im” taught me about both nonlinear and perspective-based storytelling, becoming a critical text for Young Eric.

The premise of “Almost Got ‘Im” is that five of Batman’s nastiest villains sit around playing poker, sharing stories about the times that they each came closest to taking out the Dark Knight. It’s an unexpected and fun setup that’s sure to instantly hook a kid (all these villains are in one episode??), but perhaps more sophisticated viewers too, especially in its unique structure. There are so many unexpected elements to kick us off here. We open straightaway on a bunch of bad guys, except they’re just hanging out. They’re each sharing their own stories (each taking a spin as main character, with Batman becoming the antagonist), told through flashback; the present-day action of this episode seems to serve only as a frame for past tales. But then, the episode shifts – about halfway through, as the Joker relates his story, you learn that his tale is still going on, that he’s in the middle of his plan to “get” Batman right now, just taking a little break to brag to his pals about how good he got the Caped Crusader – specifically, by using an absurd late night talk show-based scheme to capture Batman’s on-again/off-again love interest Catwoman, who Joker’s planning to chop up into cat food this very night (kid’s show!!).

The way this narrative turn makes me feel is something that I try to capture in my own work to this day. In an episode set largely in the past, the Joker shocks us into the present day with his reveal; suddenly, after a relatively breezy, low-stakes flashback episode, our perspective immediately shifts to worrying about Batman and Catwoman’s safety in the now. What seemed cozy and fun has now become a fight for the lives of our main character and his loved ones. And all it took to change things were a few words from a demented clown.

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Although I missed Batman the first night it aired due to circumstances outside my control, you better believe that I watched the show religiously after that. As mentioned, it premiered in its regular weekday time slot a day after my dad walked out, and I don’t think it’s a stretch at all to say that Batman became a lifeline for me – a bit of stability five days a week while everything else around me became nebulous, difficult, and sad.

I said in my last entry that I pretty much went through my childhood as a cypher of a main character, just assuming (lacking any other evidence) that my experiences were the “default.” When faced with the strife of a broken home, I immediately had to reckon with the knowledge that that wasn’t true – that I did not exist in a default state. Most of my classmates and friends didn’t have separated parents. I don’t think any of the people I watched on TV did. So what did that say about me?

Batman was my hero while I was learning for the first time to really grapple with trauma. Batman, of course, did come from a broken home – a home broken by violence, but still. And he took his pain and turned it into a life of helping people. In my less grounded moments, I wanted to do that too. I remember telling the nurses at my dad’s job that I wanted to be Batman when I grew up. They said I was ridiculous and laughed at me. I was ridiculous, of course. But I don’t think they needed to laugh.

I watched Batman from my mom’s house (my house) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I watched it from my dad’s places – his office for a week, then a shitty bachelor pad apartment for a few months, then a modest house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood – on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In my memory, my dad’s places taste like Tyson chicken patties and frozen baby carrots, a stark contrast to the opulent meals my mom would prepare (she was an excellent cook). My dad would watch Batman with me and remark on the aspirational quality of Bruce Wayne’s riches and martial arts prowess. My mom would be cooking while it was on.

I was shuttled and shuffled between my parents’ places for quite a while, and I kept up my schoolwork and whatever activities I could while not having a center. I didn’t have a ton of friends, although the ones I did were very kind and rad as hell. Neither of my parents were ever super big on taking time to help me socialize (though my mom definitely did more here), and because of the homes my dad had afforded, I didn’t live close to anyone I went to school with. So when I wasn’t spending time with my parents (who, it should be noted, also didn’t have a lot of friends), thrust in the middle of their dispute and shouldering the emotional burdens of both, I was spending time with Batman.

And as things between my mom and dad got more tense – fights about money, fights about property, fights about me – my center became even less stabilized. I ended up shifting away from my dad and more towards my mom, and my mom held me tight. Really tight. She’d had a really hard life. She’d lost a father, a brother, and two potential children to miscarriages. After my dad walked out, I was everything to her. That is not a comfortable or healthy place for an adolescent boy. Materially, I didn’t want for anything. Emotionally, she didn’t want me to want for anything. But god, I would have loved some room to breathe.

My mom was very stressed – understandably so. That stress manifested as a tendency to drink. While drinking, her prior traumas were unshackled.

Bruce Springsteen has a quote about his song “Independence Day”: “It’s the kind of song you write when you’re young, and you’re first startled by your parents’ humanity. You’re shocked to realize that they had their own dreams and their own desires and their own hopes… that maybe didn’t pan out exactly as they might have wished.” Although I couldn’t have articulated this feeling at the time, I now see that alcohol allowed all of my mom’s shattered dreams, desires, and hopes to cut loose from her spirit and manifest in me. And boy, she let me know about it. She was not a kind person when she drank. She was a sad person, but also a severe one. If I had a bad day at school or was struggling with an assignment, she would plainly let me know that that was unacceptable. She would not hesitate to tell me all of the failure and pain that awaited me if I didn’t perform exactly to expectations. In those hours, in contrast to her sobriety, she started sounding like my dad, telling me that the things I liked were childish and stupid, and I needed to start acting more like an adult. Again, this started when I was 8.

I’ve done a fair amount of work to reckon with this; I didn’t even understand until I was 40 that this gave me a crushing streak of perfectionism when it came to high-stakes emotional relationships. At the time, all I could internalize was that I was not the son my parents wanted. I felt my presence must have contributed to splitting the family, making my dad feel trapped and made my mom feel disappointed. And as my dad grew more distant and my mom (while drinking) grew more critical, those feelings became amplified, and I spent most of my adolescence feeling like a failure.

I desperately needed a hero during those years. I needed Batman.

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At the end of “Almost Got ‘Im,” Batman cracks the Joker’s plan and intercepts him in time to save his forbidden love interest, Catwoman. And then, the damndest thing happens. In the last minute of the episode, Catwoman delivers a speech to Batman about how maybe his effort in saving her shows that they could be together, that perhaps they could build a life free from Gotham City, from villains, from masks. “Maybe,” Batman stoically replies. Catwoman then gets distracted by a police siren behind her, and when she turns back, Batman has disappeared. She smiles and delivers the episode’s titular line: “Almost got ‘im.”

This episode had one more narrative shift up its sleeve – in its final moments, just as it seems like perhaps Batman has regained narrative centrality in his own show by saving the day, we get an entire episode bracketed by Catwoman’s agency. Indeed, pretty much the entirety of “Almost Got ‘Im” can be read as Catwoman’s attempt to “get” the hero, once we understand that the opening poker game was in fact a sting coordinated by Batman to extract Catwoman’s location from the Joker. This entire episode was Catwoman’s story, and she doesn’t even appear until the end of the second act. What writing!!

“Almost Got ‘Im” was scripted by none other than Paul Dini, the dude who, as a fresh-faced writer 10 years prior, created the He-Man episode that established the bond between the Sorceress and Teela, giving “Into the Abyss” its powerful last-minute punch. And now here he is again, delivering another last-minute emotional turn that transforms one of the most iconic Batman episodes into a perspective-shifting romance!

As stated, “Almost Got ‘Im” was my first compelling introduction to storytelling driven by multiple perspectives, and it delivered a lesson well-learned, especially in conjunction with this period in my life. It’s taken some wisdom and some work to understand that my parents’ separation was not about me – that they each had their own perspectives, their own hopes, dreams, and goals, that led to the strife in our house. I want to be able to empathize with them both, because that makes it easier for me to understand that, in those moments, I wasn’t the main character. To a degree, I do empathize. I don’t blame my mother for her alcoholism. I do still blame my father for being an asshole. As far as we know, that’s not genetic.

Writ large, Batman: The Animated Series also served as an example of what happens when the hero of a story stays stoic, static, and helpful while the fraught dramas of everyone else plays out around them. I don’t know if that was a good lesson to internalize, but it helped me a lot during a time when I needed a little strength and stability to make it through. Of course, in the real world, you can’t stay static forever, and even the little bit of stability I’d managed to achieve in my new landscape would break again right before high school.

1. I don’t actually think this is true.

2. If you think this is a wild fact to casually toss off, think about how I felt when one of my aunts drunkenly told me she thought this was the case! As far as I know, I’m adopted.