Word: mcguffin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Maybe this concern for what our fears of domestic terrorism might someday, not too far off, do to our way of life is just a sort of intellectual McGuffin, designed to make us soppy liberals take The Siege more seriously than we ought to. The movie does, after all, present the bruising, intricately staged spectacle of New York City brought to a quaking halt by a series of ever more serious bombings--first a bus, then a crowded theater, then a federal building--mounted by that lately easiest-to-despise of all groups, Arab fanatics. A panicked government institutes martial...
...except that their bills are being paid by Irish terrorists. We know even less about the guys they are trying to beat out of the box. Indeed--and this is the best part of the joke--neither they nor we ever discover what the box contains. It is a McGuffin raised to the level of Platonic ideal...
...McGuffin, a mole, a master criminal. Many minor characters of menacing mien, dubious loyalty and short life expectancy. Computer and explosive technology to die for (many will). An imperturbably resourceful undercover agent (in this case Tom Cruise) who must, among other strenuous chores, penetrate a supposedly impregnable vault wherein reposes a secret, sacred document that everybody else is pursuing too. And last but not least: a helicopter/train chase ending in the predictable fireball that equally predictably fails even to singe Cruise's beetle brows...