MacGuffin

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

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 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 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: "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.

Post-Hitchcock use of the term

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". 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." 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."

Harrison Ford used the word “MacGuffin” on the Late Show with David Letterman to refer to the plot devices in the Indiana Jones movies, specifically citing the Sankara Stones from the second film and the Holy Grail from the third film. .

Film reviewer Roger Ebert mentions the use of MacGuffins in the wide range of movies he reviews, from Children of Men to Transformers.

In Mel Brooks' film High Anxiety, which parodies many Hitchcock movies, a minor plot point is advanced by a mysterious phone call from a "Mr. MacGuffin".

The term was introduced to UK TV viewers through its prolific use in the TV game show 3-2-1 in which each object was used in a comedy sketch and then associated with a cryptic clue to be solved by the contestants to lead them to a prize of holiday, car, or dustbin.

Examples

Films

The top secret plans in ''The 39 Steps'' (1935).
The eponymous statuette in ''The Maltese Falcon'' (1941).
The sculpted head from Ponte Santa Trinita in ''Miracle at St. Anna''.
The letters of transit in ''Casablanca'' (1942).
The uranium in ''Notorious.
The case with glowing contents in ''Kiss Me Deadly'' (1955).
The "government secrets" in ''North by Northwest'' (1959).
The stamps in ''Charade'' (1963).
The Ark of the Covenant in the first Indiana Jones film, ''Raiders of the Lost Ark'' (1981).
The unknown contents of the briefcase in ''Pulp Fiction'' (1994).
The mysterious case with unknown contents in ''Ronin'' (1998).
The chest in ''Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest'' (2006).
The monster in ''Cloverfield'' (2008).

Television

The Rambaldi device in Alias
Krieger Waves in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "A Matter of Perspective"

Literature

The TV set in Wu Ming's novel 54.
The container in William Gibson's Spook Country.
The sugar bowl in A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Translation

The word "MacGuffin" occurs as such in the following languages: English, German, Basque, French, Italian, Polish, Slovenian, Finnish.

Translation(s) in other languages: Catalan: McGuffin, Spanish: Macguffin, Esperanto: Makgufino, Persian: مک‌گافین, Galician: Macguffin, Hebrew: מקגאפין, Japanese: マクガフィン, Russian: Макгаффин, Simple English: MacGuffin (cipher), Ukrainian: Макгафін, Chinese: 麥高芬.