Just watched The Hudsucker Proxy, a zany but (for the Coen brothers) mediocre movie. I had fun though, and I wonder why I never watched the VHS copy of the movie I borrowed from Jinx for most of my Sophomore year.

For about ten glorious minutes three-fourths of the way through the movie, I finally understood the term MacGuffin. According to the Wikipedia, "MacGuffin" is Alfred Hitchcock's term for "a plot device that holds no meaning or purpose of its own except to motivate the characters and advance the story."

I'd spotted a MacGuffin and I was quite proud of myself for doing so. But while I'm pretty sure there was at least one MacGuffin in this movie, I don't know exactly what it/they would be.

I think I have trouble identifying "meaningless" plot devices, in part because years of academic essay writing have trained me to read meaning into (or is it "out of"…) every interesting detail in a given work. And most of the uninteresting ones as well.

I picture Prof Goldgar, once more giving the speech he gave before we read 17th century religious poetry, the same speech he gave again when we read Dryden.

This reminds me of a story… A friend of mine was in a Music Appreciation Class once and he had this old German professor. The professor would play a piece of music, look at the class, say "Vasn't that just beautiful!" And then he would play the next piece… English students seem to think that simplicity and clarity are bad… can't something just be beautiful?

If that sounds sentimental, then I haven't done justice to my irascible professor. Sometimes you can just enjoy something, and that should be enough. But this MacGuffin thing is like a Magic Eye. I could never see those, either.