MacGuffin

This article is about the plot device. For the block cipher, see MacGuffin (cipher).

A MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin) is a plot device that motivates the characters or advances the story, but the details of which are of little or no importance otherwise.

The element that distinguishes a MacGuffin from other types of plot devices is that it is not important what the object specifically is. Anything that serves as a motivation will do. The MacGuffin might even be ambiguous. Its importance is accepted by the story's characters, but it does not actually have any effect on the story. It can be 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 all but forgotten by the end of the film.

History

According to film historian Kalton C. Lahue in his book Bound and Gagged (a history of silent-film serials), the actress Pearl White used the term "weenie" to identify whatever physical object (a roll of film, a rare coin, expensive diamonds) impelled the villains and virtuous characters to pursue each other through the convoluted plots of The Perils of Pauline and the other silent serials in which White starred.

The director and producer Alfred Hitchcock popularized both the term "MacGuffin" and the technique. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Hitchcock explained the term 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 most 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:

"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.

Incorrect definition

Not all people involved in the film industry use the term MacGuffin in the correct manner. 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". Where Hitchcock defined the MacGuffin in TV interviews as the object around which the plot revolves, and as to what that object specifically is, "The audience don't care!", Lucas 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." Lucas has also incorrectly identified the Crystal Skull from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as a McGuffin, again misinterpreting the term.

Harrison Ford used the word “MacGuffin” on Late Night with David Letterman to refer to the plot devices in the Indiana Jones movies, specifically citing the Holy Grail as an example from the third movie.

Examples

Films

• The eponymous statuette in The Maltese Falcon (1941).
• The letters of transit in Casablanca (1942).
• The uranium in Notorious (1946).
• The "government secrets" in North by Northwest (1959).
• A MacGuffin is featured prominently in each of the Indiana Jones films; the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Sankara Stones in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and a crystal skull in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
• The mysterious, dangerous contents in the trunk of the 1964 Chevrolet Malibu in Repo Man (1984).
• The unknown contents of the briefcase in Pulp Fiction (1994).
• The case in Ronin (1998).
• The key in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006).
• The formula in David Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner (1998).
• The "Rabbit's Foot" sealed canister in Mission: Impossible III (2006).
• The two audio cassettes in Diva (1981).
• Fertility in Children of Men (2006).
• The Allspark in Transformers (2007).

Television

• The Rambaldi device in Alias
• Krieger Waves in Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV series)

Literature

• The TV set in Wu Ming's novel 54.
• The container in William Gibson's "Spook Country".

Comics

• The eponymous treasure in the manga One Piece.

See also

• Unexposed contents
• Big Dumb Object
• Chekhov's gun

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 the website of an amateur linguist who edited a book (ISBN 0-471-23032-4) assembled from the site's material
• FAQs Page of the Hitchcock Scholars/'MacGuffin' website