kung fu grippe

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.

Y’know how, at first, Psycho seems like it’s going to be a heist movie about Janet Leigh’s embezzling then going on the lam? Yeah. That.

Hitch was the master of the MacGuffin:

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.”

And — yes! — examples!

The top secret plans in The 39 Steps (1935).

The eponymous statuette in The Maltese Falcon (1941).

The letters of transit in Casablanca (1942).

The uranium in Notorious (1946).

The case with glowing contents in Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

The “government secrets” in North by Northwest (1959).

The stamps in Charade (1963).

The Death Star plans in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977).

The Ark of the Covenant in the first Indiana Jones film, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

The unknown, glowing contents of the briefcase in Pulp Fiction (1994).

The Rabbit’s Foot in Mission: Impossible III (2006).[citation nee

The chest in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006).

The Allspark in Transformers (2007)

The Russian painting in RocknRolla (2008).

The sculpted head from Ponte Santa Trinita in Miracle at St. Anna (2008).

The silver briefcase in Jack Said (2009).

The unobtanium in Avatar (2009).

Another example — hypothetically, anyway — would be to mention an obscure storytelling term in order to manufacture a baseless reason for posting some hot photos of Janet Leigh in a bra.