As the summer movie season revs up it’s fun to look at tropes of action movie plot development. Today: the MacGuffin. If Wikipedia is to be believed, Alfred Hitchcock said:
[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.
Most film textbooks I’ve read cite the eponymous statue in The Maltese Falcon. Another example would be the magic rocks in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (or the Ark of the Covenant, or the Holy Grail, or the Cystal Skull). In its most pure form, what the MacGuffin won’t affect the film at all. The villains want something. The heroes want to stop them from getting it. In a fantasy story it might be a magical weapon, while in a 007 movie maybe it’s nuclear launch codes. What’s important is that the MacGuffin provides a reason for the characters to come into conflict.
I’ll update this post, and probably Twitter, with the object in question for each summer movie I go see.
- Star Trek: first out of the gate for me, and mostly this one is a chase. I guess Spock’s red matter would be the MacGuffin.
- Terminator Salvation: it’s basically a rescue film for Kyle Reese, so I guess he is the MacGuffin here.