A MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin or maguffin) is "a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction".[1] The defining aspect of a MacGuffin is that the major players in the story are (at least initially) willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to obtain it, regardless of what the MacGuffin actually is. In fact, the specific nature of the MacGuffin may be ambiguous, undefined, generic, left open to interpretation or otherwise completely unimportant to the plot. Common examples are money, victory, glory, survival, a source of power, a potential threat, or it may simply be something entirely unexplained.
The MacGuffin is common in films, especially thrillers. Usually the MacGuffin is the central focus of the film in the first act, and then declines in importance as the struggles and motivations of characters play out. It may come back into play at the climax of the story, but sometimes the MacGuffin is actually forgotten by the end of the story. Multiple MacGuffins are sometimes—somewhat derisively—referred to as plot coupons.[2][3]
The term is also used by a game development studio as a reference to a design object which forces interactivity on to a narrative.[4]
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Objects that serve the plot function of MacGuffins have had long use in storytelling, for example, the Sampo in a segment of the Finnish epic Kalevala. However the specific term "MacGuffin" appears to have originated in 20th-century filmmaking.
The director and producer Alfred Hitchcock popularized both the term "MacGuffin" and the technique, with his 1935 film The 39 Steps, an early example of the concept.[5] Hitchcock explained the term "MacGuffin" 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".[6]
Interviewed in 1966 by François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock illustrated the term "MacGuffin" with this story:[7]
Hitchcock related this anecdote in a television interview for Richard Schickel's documentary The Men Who Made the Movies and for Dick Cavett's interview. According to author Ken Mogg, screenwriter Angus MacPhail, a friend of Hitchcock, may have originally coined the term.[8]
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".[9] 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".[10] 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".[11]
The term lent itself to several "in" jokes: in Mel Brooks's film High Anxiety, which parodies many Hitchcock films, a minor plot point is advanced by a mysterious phone call from a "Mr. MacGuffin".
In the movie Léon (aka The Professional), when Léon and Mathilda check into the hotel, Mathilda tells Léon she's filling the form out with "the name of a girl in my class who makes me sick." Following with "If things get hot, she'll take the heat". Later in the movie we hear the Hotel manager banging on the hotel room door exclaiming "Mr. MacGuffin?!"
In the TV show Due South during the episode Chicago Holiday, the MacGuffin is a matchbook that makes its way around the episode going from character to character. The hotel maid in this episode has the name of Mrs. McGuffin and earlier in the episode, a mall security guard's name is Niffug C.M.. This is an ananym of the hotel maid's surname, McGuffin. Also, the basement janitor in the hotel in part 1 is named Mac Guff.
Examples in film include the meaning of rosebud in Citizen Kane (1941),[12] the titular Maltese Falcon, the Rabbit's Foot in Mission: Impossible III (2006),[13] the briefcases in Pulp Fiction and Ronin, and the mineral unobtainium in Avatar (2009).[14] The 2011 Martin Scorsese film Hugo initially focuses on a mysterious notebook taken from the main character and his struggle to retrieve it; "The notebook, of course, is just another storytelling device (the McGuffin) that ultimately proves irrelevant."[15]
Examples in television include the Rambaldi device in Alias,[16] the "orb" in The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.,[17] and Krieger Waves in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "A Matter of Perspective".[18][19][20]
Examples in literature include the television set in Wu Ming's novel 54[21][22] and the container in William Gibson's Spook Country.[23]
In the game Kingdom of Loathing the player must go through a series of sub-quests to obtain the "Holy MacGuffin". It is never really explained what this MacGuffin is, only that "You're not really sure what this is, but it seems really, really important. Better get it to the Council right away."
In discussing the critical failure of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Steven Spielberg said, "I sympathize with people who didn't like the MacGuffin (the crystal skull) because I never liked the MacGuffin."[24]