TANGLED (3D)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, fascinating and uncanny tale of an “eighteen-year-old” agoraphobe with “long,” “blonde” “hair,” if you know what I mean, that serves as rope and prehensile tail and microcosmic spiral, and with whose “magical restorative powers” she keeps her manipulative mother artificially young until an intruder helps the girl escape from the “big erect tower” with her “little chameleon friend” to fulfill her lifelong wish to see the “lights in the sky” (she really is the homeschooled hippiechick Neil calls her) and after winning over the entire clientele of a local leather bar and “taming a stallion” and “breaking open a dam” before “hiding in a cave,” if you know what I mean, winds up finally seeing the lofted lanterns with the “man in a boat” who is actually the “thief” to whom she gives her “crown,” and finds herself a “princess,” if you know what I mean, I mean her innocence is an innocence both in story—she never imagined her own true station—and of story, since she covers the walls of her de facto prison with pictures of the world as she has gleaned it through what portals she may access, and these very images later reveal themselves to have contained all along the crest that signifies her hidden identity, in the same way anyone’s impressions, confusing and piecemeal, even to the point of sickening us with their apparent arbitrariness, also encode intuited points of contact—open sesames—that find us, if not understanding, then somehow understood, as when as a kid I used to travel home from the movie theater already in the thrall of the latest film I’d seen, so that the world would inevitably take on whatever cast or mood I’d been moved to inhabit, and I grew to love, and love still, this very way that the world takes a stamp or filter, not just the preference of a single self but the tint and hue of collective persons and the way they push and pull with what only seems to be the impassive thingness of it all (the hard asphalt of the traffic circle, set off by its forbidding curb), when actually, impossibly, the world actively marvels at our rootless self-aware flesh even as, at the same time, the year’s obsession with dimensionality aside, our communion is far from total, the couple sucking face in the back row distracts us, the lights come on, every strand is cut and slackens and we find ourselves awakened and, in the mirror, gone gorgeously but brutally brunette.