Waiting for MacGuffin

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Alfred Hitchcock is credited with coining the term “MacGuffin,” but not the thing itself, which has been around since people started telling stories to each other. In spy movies and thrillers, a MacGuffin is the object that sets the plot of the movie in motion; it’s usually a something people desire that the hero and his nemeses pursue, and that pursuit provides the film’s plot. The specific nature and form of the MacGuffin is usually unimportant to the overall plot. In plot terms, but not theological ones, the apple in Genesis is a MacGuffin.

Neither of the two most famous examples of a MacGuffin in film history appear in a Hitchcock film however, even though he used the device quite frequently in his many movies (he directed more than 50 films from the 1920s through the ’70s).
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What Happened to Rexdale Henry?

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Rexdale Henry spent the last five nights of his life in the Neshoba County Jail in Philadelphia, Mississippi. At 10:00 a.m. on July 14, he was found dead in his cell; 30 minutes earlier, according to the official police report, he was alive. The cause of his death has not been determined, and even though an official autopsy has been conducted, his family and friends have paid for an independent autopsy. Results have not been publicly released from either autopsy as of this writing.

Rexdale Henry

Rexdale Henry

Henry, 53, was arrested on July 9 for “failure to pay a fine,” according to records. Many writers are noting the several surface similarities between this case and the more prominent one of Sandra Bland, the young woman who died in police custody in Texas after a weekend in jail: both were arrested for seemingly minor infractions, both spent several days in custody, and both died suddenly and out of police sight mere minutes after police had interacted them. Both were community activists. Mr. Henry was a civil rights activist and a leader in the Choctaw community; he had stood for election for the Choctaw Tribal Council this month.

Ms. Bland’s arrest was recorded on the arresting officer’s cruiser dashcam; there is no similar recording of the interaction between Mr. Henry and the arresting officer. All that is known about Mr. Henry is that he was arrested, held in jail for several days, and died. Last fall, a man died in the same jail under similarly murky circumstances.
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Don’t Dream It

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In one dream, a dream encountered once each month or so (last niht!), a password to an email service or the passcode to the office desktop itself can not be remembered. His hands don’t work. Did they ever? Or interruptions prevent him from typing it in within a fifteen-second countdown, and the entire screen is taken up with 1-5, 1-4, 1-3 … .

He has been away from the office for so long—a decade—and he sees the voice mail light flashing on his phone, but he can not remember the four-digit access code. How many messages? he wonders.
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