Early in “The Kids Grow Up,” Doug Block’s captivating documentary about his teenage daughter’s final year at home before leaving for college, he describes his rising feelings of anxiety as her departure became a concrete reality. While images of Lucy Block growing up play lyrically across the screen, it becomes clear that she’s a child whose rapport with the camera is as intimate and easy as with a family member.
As Block explains, not only was his daughter born “at the dawn of the consumer camcorder,” but throughout her years growing up, she suffered “the double misfortune of having a documentary filmmaker for a father.”
As “The Kids Grow Up” toggles gracefully between images of Lucy as an enchanting toddler and those of an equally beguiling, self-possessed young woman, the film indelibly captures the fishbowl life of a generation that came of age in front of cameras — mostly wielded by fathers — that served as devices for both neurotic attachment and emotional distance. “The Kids Grow Up” is about many things — intimacy, mortality, baby boomers who behaved more like buddies to their kids than parents — but its most potent encounters occur when Lucy chafes at being filmed by her father, who during her final year at home, seems increasingly obsessed with preserving every moment for posterity. (“Just think,” Block’s wife, Marjorie, observes mordantly, “when she works through all this in therapy, she can bring the footage with her!”)
In “The Kids Grow Up,” Lucy emerges as a subject who’s clearly at ease and eagerly candid in front of the camera, but also fiercely defending the private life that her father finds so confounding. (The dynamics take on an even higher emotional charge when Lucy’s French boyfriend arrives for an extended visit.) On prom day, Lucy complains that she’s “tired of being filmed.” Later, Block’s omnipresent camera brings the situation to an emotional head. “I’m really [angry] that you’re doing this at all,” she says tearfully. “I hate it.”
Although “The Kids Grow Up” leads viewers to think that Block did nothing but film Lucy for every minute of her young, hyper-observed life, he estimates that he filmed her for an average of about three hours a year. What’s more, the two had clear ground rules that he would stop filming the moment she asked, which she doesn’t do in that scene. (He did stop filming Lucy a few days later, then resumed when she asked him to start again.)
Still, the episode resonates as a particularly poignant example of a unique family dynamic, born of the video-camera revolution and magnified by the onset of YouTube and Facebook, wherein parents are increasingly relating to their children as subjects. Whether it’s the casual upload of a particularly funny picture or sharing a hilarious video with family and friends, every instance of multimedia-sharing has the potential to become a mass-market blockbuster, as anyone who has giggled at — and linked to — “David After Dentist” or “Laughing Baby Ripping Paper” can attest.
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