Macguffin
For the block cipher, see MacGuffin (cipher).
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: " 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 ...
.
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. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)
Slavoj Zizek.