As I've said many times before, I'm a big Tom Cruise fan. This fact, and my free revelation of it, comes as a result of my ability to almost completely disassociate performers' professional creations from their personal lives. I don't think I've ever commented on the private lives of actors, musicians and other celebrities, and I won't start now.
For some reason, Tom Cruise excites me. It has been this way for as long as I can remember, all the way to
Cocktail. Now, after seeing
Mission: Impossible III I am driven to comment on the movie and my man, Tom (as I did for
Vanilla Sky,
Minority Report and
War of the Worlds).
The movie uses a classic plot device knows as the
MacGuffin to propel the story forward. I first learned about MacGuffins from Alfred Hitchcock, who explained it by telling this story:
It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, 'What's that package up there in the baggage rack?' And the other answers, 'Oh that's a McGuffin.' The first one asks 'What's a McGuffin?' 'Well' the other man says, 'It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' The first man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,' and the other one answers 'Well, then that's no McGuffin!' So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.
And that's exactly what it is - nothing at all. In MI3 everyone is concerned with getting and protecting the "Rabbit's Foot" but we (and, coincidentally, even my man, Tommy) never find out what it actually is. The point is that we don't go to movies to learn about weapons of mass destruction. We watch movies and TV shows to see normal, amazing, sexy or scary people interact and do funny, arousing, crazy, weird things.
All the explosions, crazy action, spy technology, beautiful locations, fast cars and Rabbit's Footses are all meant to highlight and accentuate the struggles that humans go through with and for each other. In that sense, MI3 is a standard love story of how far we'll go for those we love and how difficult it is to keep things hidden from them.
Beyond that simple view, MI3 also brings to my mind thoughts about how we tend to complicate our relationships, creating MacGuffins that mean nothing and needlessly distract from the raw emotions we normally supress. I've experienced them myself more times than I can bear. The early parts of relationships are often so built up with meaninglessly complex distractions. We think too hard and too wide, instead of focusing on the here and now, the brevity of life and the simple beauty of finding someone you connect with, even if for just a moment,
that moment. Why think too hard when it may be my last moment? Why is it a Mission Impossible to find the girl that doesn't get tripped up by meaningless MacGuffins?
