http://www.nationalreview.com/node/423898/print In the Left’s Story of Government, the State Is Always the Hero
By Jonah Goldberg — September 12, 2015
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.
Dear Reader (and particularly the lawyer at the State Department who has been selected to pretend he gave Hillary Clinton permission to set up a secret server),
About ten days ago, Dan McLaughlin (a.k.a. Baseballcrank, not to be confused with Footballdyspeptic or Tennispederast or Bocceballcurmudgeon) tweeted, “So many things make more sense when you re-read @AceofSpadesHQ on The MacGuffinization of American Politics.”
As I had never read Ace on the MacGuffinization of American Politics, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Suddenly, my MacGuffin became an essay on MacGuffinization. I set out to read it. But before I could click the link, I was beset by acolytes of a snake cult. And . . . oh never mind, this gag isn’t going to work.
Anyway, I read the essay and lo and behold, McLaughlin was right. I haven’t fully gotten it out of my head yet, which can lead to awkwardness as I have a habit of shouting “get out of my head!” at inappropriate moments under such circumstances. So I will try get it out of my head here. Ace writes:
In a movie or book, “The MacGuffin” is the thing the hero wants.
Usually the villain wants it too, and their conflict over who will end up with The MacGuffin forms the basic spine of the story.
In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the MacGuffin is, of course, the Lost Ark. Indy wants it; the Nazis have it. This basic conflict over simple possession animates a two hour long movie.
Alfred Hitchcock noted — counterintuitively, when you first hear this — that the specifics of the MacGuffin don’t really matter at all to a movie. He pointed out that the audience doesn’t care at all about the MacGuffin. The hero in the movie itself cares, but the audience doesn’t.
In one Hitchcock film, the MacGuffin was some smuggled uranium hidden in vintage wine bottles. But Hitchcock noted it didn’t matter if it was uranium in wine bottles, or a fragment of a diplomatic dispatch from the Nazi high command, or a hidden murder weapon, or photographs proving a Senator’s affair.
The Lost Ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark could have easily been replaced with some missing Shankara Stones from a Thuggee temple, or the Holy Grail. In fact, that’s exactly what they changed the MacGuffin to in the sequels.
No audience member really cared if the Nazis wound up with the Ark of the Covenant….But we cared about Indy. He was a character we liked, a character that sparked our imaginations; whether he was looting a South American burial mound (illegally, by the way!) or blowing off his students by sneaking out a back window during office hours (poor work ethic, incidentally), we rooted for him to win….
A quick aside. I have a longstanding grievance about exceptions to the rule of MacGuffins. Sometimes you really do care about the MacGuffin, particularly when the MacGuffin is a baby. Imagine if you replaced the golden idol in the first scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark with a live infant.
“Throw me the whip!”
“Throw me the baby!”
There is a very long list of reasons why the movie Willow was awful. But near the top of the list is the fact that the MacGuffin was a human infant. No one really cares when you drop the briefcase with the nuclear codes or when you throw the smegma sample from the dead hooker’s perineum. But when you toss around a baby (or a puppy, kitten, etc.), the audience stops caring about the hero’s heroic struggle of heroism and instead worries about the baby. Interestingly, adult living MacGuffins usually aren’t as problematic. Audiences don’t care if the super-hot princess or telepath is dragged around. But the only time a baby MacGuffin didn’t ruin the movie was in Raising Arizona, as a far as I can remember.
continued
