The MacGuffin

It is a rare ability for a film to both rely on a sense of nostalgia and simultaneously introduce something new that is its own. Drive, a neo-noir thriller from director Nicolas Winding Refn (Bronson, Valhalla Rising), is a perfect example of one of those rare films. The story follows an enigmatic man who drives stunt cars for films by day, and moonlights as a getaway driver at night. The driver, who has no name, meets his neighbor and her son one day and establishes a relationship that leads him into a web of betrayal and violence.

Many more intelligent people than I have already summarized life as a series of dueling, chaotic and organized events. John Lennon said, life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. Roberto Begnini’s character Bob, in Jim Jarmusch’s 1985 film Down by Law, makes the observation tha it’s a sad and beautiful world. The phrase leaves an impact on the co-star Tom Waits’s character, Zach, who begins singing the phrase in a drunken soliloquy. My point is, life happens. And life has certainly happened in my reality recently. Leaving me little time for the movie watching I prefer to do. However, as the opportunity has afforded it, I’ve been able to sneak in a film or two here and there. While I have not been to the theaters since I saw Fast Five for the MacGuffin, I have been able to slide in the occasional DVD, and a Blu-ray or two.

“It places the lotion in the basket.” – Buffalo Bill

I once took a course in college named “Murder: The Psychology of The Serial Killer.” In it, we learned a brief history of some of the more notorious murderers in U.S. history. We studied their backgrounds, methods, and obsessions, trying to get a glimpse into their patterns and see how authorities were able to track down and apprehend a number of these people. One of the more interesting stories was that of The Green River Killer, a serial murderer based out of the Pacific Northwest, and how the lead investigator conducted a number of interviews with another famous criminal, Ted Bundy, in an attempt to catch the killer before he struck again. This fascinated me, as I remembered the exact same process done in Jonathan Demme’s great, tense thriller The Silence of the Lambs (1991).