MacGuffin
A MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin or Maguffin) is a plot device that motivates the characters and/or advances the story, but has little other relevance to the story.
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."
Description
 |
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, it 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.
Because a MacGuffin is, by definition, basically unimportant to the story, its use can challenge the audience's suspension of disbelief. Well-done works will compensate for this with a good story, interesting characters, talented acting/writing, and so on. In the case of an ambiguous MacGuffin, audiences can imagine what it is or ignore it and just go along with the story.
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.
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 McGuffin explanation as a roundabout method of telling the first man to mind his own business. According to author Ken Mogg, screenwriter Angus MacPhail may have originally coined the term. MacPhail was a friend of Hitchcock. [1]
More succinctly, on TV interviews from time to time, Hitchcock defined the MacGuffin as the object around which the plot revolves, and as to what that object specifically is, "The audience don't care!"[citation needed]
Problems with defining MacGuffins
Not all people involved in the film industry use the term MacGuffin in precisely the same way. 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".[1] In contrast to the definition of the term attributed to Hitchcock where the MacGuffin serves merely to motivate the characters but otherwise has no significance, R2-D2 is an important character in his own right and carries information critical to the development of the plot (specifically, whether or not the Rebels can blow up the Death Star).
Noted film critic Roger Ebert has also used the term in a way dissimilar to that of Hitchcock, in this case describing an artifact known as the Allspark in the film Transformers as an "an alien MacGuffin" that "doesn't much matter".[2] In this instance, the Allspark differs from the Hitchcock definition of the term by being of importance, as it is the center of the entire plot in the movie.
Examples
Films
- The eponymous statuette in The Maltese Falcon (1941).[2]
- The briefcase in Pulp Fiction (1994). [3]
- The case in Ronin (1998). [4]
Television
- The Rambaldi device in Alias [5]
- Krieger Waves [6] in Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV series) [7][3]
Literature
Comics
See also
References
- ^ Star Wars (1977) Region 2 DVD release (2004). Audio commentary, 00:14:44 - 00:15:00.
- ^ "Reviews: Transformers; Chicago Sun-Times". Retrieved 2007-07-09.
- ^ A Matter of Perspective (1990) Region 1 DVD release (2002). Season 3, Disk 4.
Further reading
- Francois Truffaut. Hitchcock. ISBN 0-671-60429-5.
- Slavoj Zizek. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). ISBN 0-86091-592-1.
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
- Spielberg, Lucas, Ford Interview about Indiana Jones IV — in which George Lucas repeatedly refers to a mysterious McGuffin.