From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin) is "a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction".^[1]

Sometimes, the specific nature of the MacGuffin is not important to the plot such that anything that serves as a motivation serves its purpose. The MacGuffin can sometimes be ambiguous, completely undefined, generic or left open to interpretation.

The MacGuffin is common in films, especially thrillers. Commonly, though not always, the MacGuffin is the central focus of the film in the first act, and later declines in importance as the struggles and motivations of characters play out. Sometimes the MacGuffin is even forgotten by the end of the film.

History and use

The director and producer Alfred Hitchcock popularized both the term "MacGuffin" and the technique. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Hitchcock explained the term "McGuffin" in a 1939 lecture at Columbia University: "[We] have a name in the studio, and we call it the 'MacGuffin'. It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers".

Interviewed in 1966 by François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock illustrated the term "MacGuffin" with this story:^[2]

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.

Hitchcock related this anecdote in a television interview for Richard Schickel's documentary The Men Who Made the Movies. Hitchcock's verbal delivery made it clear that the second man has thought up the MacGuffin explanation as a roundabout method of telling the first man to mind his own business. According to author Ken Mogg, screenwriter Angus MacPhail, a friend of Hitchcock's, may have originally coined the term.^[3]

On the commentary soundtrack to the 2004 DVD release of Star Wars, writer and director George Lucas describes R2-D2 as "the main driving force of the movie ... what you say in the movie business is the MacGuffin ... the object of everybody's search".^[4] In TV interviews, Hitchcock defined a MacGuffin as the object around which the plot revolves, but, as to what that object specifically is, he declared, "the audience don't care".^[5] Lucas, on the other hand, believes that the MacGuffin should be powerful and that "the audience should care about it almost as much as the dueling heroes and villains on-screen".^[6]

The term has lent itself to at least one "in" joke: in Mel Brooks' film High Anxiety, which parodies many Hitchcock films, a minor plot point is advanced by a mysterious phone call from a "Mr. MacGuffin". Further, it has been adopted as the name of a game development studio as a reference to a design object which forces interactivity onto a narrative.^[7]

Examples

Films

• The top secret plans in The 39 Steps (1935).^[8]
• The eponymous statuette in The Maltese Falcon (1941).^[9]
• The letters of transit in Casablanca (1942).^[10]
• The uranium in Notorious (1946).^[11][12]
• The case with glowing contents in Kiss Me Deadly (1955).^[12]
• The "government secrets" in North by Northwest (1959).^[13][14]
• The stolen $40,000 in Psycho (1960).^[15]
• The stamps in Charade (1963).^[14]
• The stolen blueprints of the Death Star (carried by R2-D2) in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) ^[4]
• The Ark of the Covenant in the first Indiana Jones film, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).^[16]
• The mysterious and lethal contents of the trunk of a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu in Repo Man (1984)^[17]
• The unknown, glowing contents of the briefcase in Pulp Fiction (1994).^[18][19]
• The silver briefcase in Ronin (1998)
• The chest in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006).^[20]
• The rabbit's foot in Mission Impossible 3 (2006).^[21]
• The AllSpark in Transformers (2007).^[22]
• The silver briefcase in Jack Said (2009).^[23]
• The unobtanium in Avatar (2009).^[24]

Other media

MacGuffins in television include the Rambaldi device in Alias^[25], the "orb" in The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.^[26].

Macguffins found in Literature include the TV set in Wu Ming's novel 54^[27][28] and the container in William Gibson's Spook Country.^[29]

See also

• Alien space bats
• Big Dumb Object
• Chekhov's gun
• The Double McGuffin
• Unexposed contents

References

Further reading

• Francois Truffaut. Hitchcock
• Slavoj Zizek. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)
• Slavoj Zizek. The Sublime Object of Ideology

External links

• A.Word.A.Day — McGuffin, from Wordsmith.org
• FAQs Page of the Hitchcock Scholars/'MacGuffin' website
• "The Tribal Mind: Devices and Desires", David Dale. The Sun-Herald, June 9, 2008.

Definition from Wiktionary, a free dictionary

English

Wikipedia has an article on:

MacGuffin

Wikipedia

Alternative spellings

• McGuffin

Etymology

Used by Alfred Hitchcock.

Pronunciation

• (RP, US) IPA: /məˈgʌf.ɪn/
•  Audio (US)^{help, file}

Noun

MacGuffin (plural MacGuffins)

1. (narratology) A plot element or other device used to catch the audience's attention and maintain suspense, but whose exact nature has fairly little influence over the storyline.

Synonyms

• red herring