The MacGuffin
The thing the characters care about and the film doesn't. Hitchcock's name for a structural decoy.
- story conventions
- film-language
- narrative
- hitchcock
Hitchcock's term for the object that motivates the plot while being, in itself, nothing: the secret plans, the uranium, the money. The characters must want it desperately; the audience only needs to believe that they want it. Its emptiness is the point — it frees the film to be about something else.
Canonical case
The $40,000 in Psycho (1960). It drives the first act absolutely, then — The money dies with Marion — sinks into a swamp wrapped in newspaper, unnoticed by every surviving character. The film was never about the money; the money existed to walk Marion into the Bates Motel and to misdirect the audience's genre expectations (crime thriller) away from what's coming.
Sources
Truffaut contains the classic MacGuffin exchange, including Hitchcock's shaggy-dog story of the "lion-catching apparatus in the Scottish Highlands".