We watched Aladdin last night. It's funny to watch a movie as an adult that you saw so many times when you were a child. That movie, among many, many others, is traced from beginning to end by my synapses. Watching it, which I haven't done since I was about 12, feels like getting on a roll with Guitar Hero, when your flow matches what is on the screen exactly, strong thick colored lines, vibrating and gushing from the whammy. That is what watching a childhood movie is like. Your head goes note for note in time with the TV.
It is ghostly and strange because I have forgotten this movie, at least forgotten that I remember it. I feel like Jason Bourne watching his limbs whirl to break a dude's neck with perfect precision, amnesiated from the fact that he had ever had that experience before. My self, 15, 20 years ago is awakened for a second to relay a message to me and then he's gone.
There are things that are in me that I've never decoded. At one point, the Sultan says to Jasmine, "Allah forbid you should have any daughters." When I heard that as a child, I didn't know who Allah was. I thought it was like, "I'll-a forbid you should have any daughters," and I didn't know why the Sultan talked funny for one line in the whole movie. I wonder what other perceptions of the world were encrypted by childhood codes and entombed in my brain cells.
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