- This article is about the plot device. For the block cipher, see MacGuffin (cipher).
A MacGuffin is a plot device that holds no meaning or purpose of its own except to motivate the characters and advance the story. The device is usually used in films, especially thrillers. The term "MacGuffin" was invented by Alfred Hitchcock, who made extensive use of the device in his films. It is still almost always used in specific reference to Hitchcock's plots, rather than as a general term for similar narrative conveniences in unrelated stories.
In Hitchcock's films
One example of a MacGuffin in Hitchcock's movies is the uranium hidden in wine bottles in Notorious: it is the reason the story takes place, but it otherwise means nothing. The story could just as easily have used diamonds (which were in fact proposed as an alternative MacGuffin during production [1] (http://yorty.sonoma.edu/filmfrog/reviews/n/notorious.html)), gold or extraordinary rare wine as the plot device.
One of Hitchcock's most memorable MacGuffins is the one used in North by Northwest. In this movie, the MacGuffin is the character of "George Kaplan", who is being chased by the enemy spies. Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is mistaken for Kaplan by the spies, and so they chase him instead. Thornhill spends the course of the movie trying to find George Kaplan himself without realizing that George Kaplan does not even exist. Both the hero and the villains of the movie are chasing nothing more than a puff of hot air, making this a true MacGuffin.
Interviewed in 1966 by Francois Truffaut, 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.
Later uses and references
Just as Hitchcock's films influenced later filmmaking, the MacGuffin also diffused in name, and in concept, into popular culture. For instance, the briefcase in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is a MacGuffin (and a nod to Kiss Me Deadly). The contents are never shown; that section of the plot is not about the briefcase so much as what happens because of it. In the film Ronin, 'the case' is also a classic MacGuffin, as is the FedEx package that Tom Hanks holds onto throughout his various adventures on the deserted island in Cast Away and finally manages to deliver to the recipient in the very end. An explicit MacGuffin reference comes from an episode of the 'Bionic Six' cartoon of the late 1980s in which the 'MacGuffin Ray', a dummy weapon, is used exclusively to lure the evil Dr. Scarab out of hiding.
In an explicit nod to Hitchcock, Paul Muldoon's 1990 long poem Madoc: A Mystery includes a shadowy, conspiratorial character named MacGuffin or MacGoffin.
Slavoj Zizek, a Hitchcock aficionado, has used the MacGuffin as an illustration of the structural principles of psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan in his book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). In 2003 Zizek compared the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to a MacGuffin:
- Do the "Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" not fit perfectly the status of the MacGuffin? (Incidentally, one of the most famous Hitchcockian MacGuffins IS a potential weapon of mass destruction - the bottles with "radioactive diamonds" in Notorious!) Are they not also an elusive entity, never empirically specified - when, a couple of years ago, the UN inspectors were searching for them in Iraq, they were expected to be hidden in the most disparate and improbable places, from the (rather logical place of) desert to the (slightly irrational) cellars of the presidential palaces (so that, when the palace is bombed, they may poison Saddam and his entire entourage?), allegedly present in large quantities, yet magically moved around all the time by the hands of workers, and the more all-present and all-powerful in their threat, the more they are destroyed, as if the distraction of the greater part of them magically heightens the destructive power of the remainder? As such, they by definition cannot ever be found, and are therefore all the more dangerous...[2] (http://lacan.com/iraq1.htm)
See also
References
- Francois Truffaut. Hitchcock. ISBN 0671604295.
- Slavoj Zizek. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). ISBN 0860915921.
External links
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