The MacGuffin

The MacGuffin is Hitchcock's word for the thing the plot runs on and the film does not care about: the secret plans, the uranium, the money. The characters must want it desperately. The audience only has to believe that they want it. Its emptiness is a licence: a film relieved of caring about its plot object is free to be about something else. The unsettled question is what. The books agree on the definition and disagree, usefully, on the purpose.

One device, three purposes

Barsam and Monahan (Looking at Movies) give the plainest definition: an object, document or secret "of vital importance to the characters" that "turns out to be less significant to the overall narrative than we might at first expect" (lam 34). Their example is Psycho's $40,000, and their footnote sends the reader to Hitchcock's own account in Truffaut. On this reading the MacGuffin is a motivation device: it moves the characters, and then the story moves on.

Film Art shifts the beneficiary to the audience. Hitchcock made thrillers, not mysteries, and in North by Northwest the mystery element "can serve as merely a pretext for intriguing the audience" (fa 406). The object keeps us leaning forward while the narration works on suspense and surprise.

An essay in After Hitchcock (Boyd & Palmer, eds) names the real work. In The 39 Steps and North by Northwest the spy conspiracies are "blocking" elements the hero must overcome "in order to take possession of the woman"; they generate the MacGuffin, "the disposable motor that is quickly forgotten by the audience once the plotting, in both senses, comes to an end" (ah 94). The thriller is a romance with an alibi. Three answers, then, to what the emptiness buys: character motivation, audience attention, or a courtship. Ask which one a film is spending it on.

On the bench

Psycho is the demonstration, and an unusually honest one. The money drives the first act, gets Marion out of Phoenix and into the motel, then sinks into the swamp wrapped in newspaper, unnoticed by Norman and never mentioned again (The money dies with Marion). Looking at Movies notices the same thing: the killer "doesn't seem to know it exists" (lam 34). Most films pretend the object mattered. Psycho lets you watch the pretence dissolve, and the money's other function shows in retrospect: it aimed the audience at the wrong genre so that Killing the protagonist at minute 47 could land on an unguarded flank. The theft is plausible only because Psycho — the opening stripped Marion's respectability in its first minute.

The Craft has a near relative. Manon, the deity the coven invokes, was invented by the film's witchcraft consultant so that no teenager could call on anything real (Manon was invented so nobody could call him). The characters must believe in it; the audience need only believe they do; and it was made empty for a reason Hitchcock never had to consider. Taxi Driver is the contrast. Its plot object, the rescue of Iris, is one the film and its audience care about, and the argument over what it meant has never closed (Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending).

What to look for

• What do the characters want that the film stops mentioning? When exactly does it stop?
• Who benefits from the object: the characters, who need a reason to move, or the audience, who need a reason to watch?
• If the object were swapped for another, would anything change? If not, it is a MacGuffin.

In the books

Hitchcock used the otherwise meaningless term MacGuffin to refer to an object, document, or secret within a story that is of vital importance to the characters, and thus motivates their actions and the conflict, but that turns out to be less significant to the overall narrative than we might at first expect.

— Barsam & Monahan, lam 34

North by Northwest shows that the mystery element can serve as merely a pretext for intriguing the audience.

— Film Art, fa 406

the disposable motor that is quickly forgotten by the audience once the plotting, in both senses, comes to an end.

— After Hitchcock, ah 94