Tangled (2010)

 

Of all the questions Tangled (2010) raises, perhaps the most important is this: “Can a frying pan be a lethal weapon?” The film offers a resolute ‘no’; reality, a decided ‘yes’ (cf.https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20160218/west-ridge/two-more-charged-with-murdering-w-ridge-man-with-frying-pan-at-party; http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2016/feb/01/son-tells-police-he-killed-mother-with-frying-pan-/). This is interesting, considering that Rapunzel, whose name her true love manages to never say for the duration of the movie (does he know it?), brutalizes Flynn/Eugene with it—multiple times—when they first meet. The film further enforces this ‘no’ by, in the end, replacing the swords of the castle guards with frying pans—because “crime in the kingdom disappeared almost overnight.”

It’s as if Tangled is trying its hardest to convince us that frying pans, though versatile, are completely safe. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would suggest that the film actually tells the story of how its two directors covered up a brutal frying pan murder. Or, more to the point, that Rapunzel, out of guilt for killing Flynn with a frying pan, concocts a story that blames her adoptive mother for Flynn’s death, the mother whom Rapunzel already hates for having stolen her from her real family and locking her into a life of only semi-luxury.

And it’s Flynn’s death that is Tangled’s core truth—it’s the death of the man who gingerly examined his once-injured hand as he walked away from the fire. It hardly matters that, against its fictional world’s logic in which hair heals (not tears), the film reverses it. The white man Flynn is no longer breathing.