MacGuffins and Messages in Indiana Jones: The Dial

In the final Indiana Jones story (so far) we get an appropriately final MacGuffin: The Dial of Destiny.

To a man who is “past by” by time and the world itself, Jones is feeling lost. He has always lived more “backwards facing” than others, obsessed with history and artifacts. Now, he is losing his capacity to be active (even though as we saw in the first of these posts, he is more of a passive character anyway!) The Dial offers Jones another place, in the past, where he can escape the modern world and find peace.

The temptation of this final MacGuffin is the temptation of memory and nostalgia. The message of the movie is that we can never live in the past. We can never find peace in memories, and nostalgia, far from a pleasant feeling, can be torture in disguise.

We need to always live in the present, today, where we can make the sort of memories it will be pleasant to visit, but only for short visits.