Film Vocabulary: MacGuffin

A MacGuffin is a plot device that motivates the characters and advances the story, but has little other relevance to the story itself.

The element that distinguishes a MacGuffin from other types of plot devices is that it is not important what object the MacGuffin specifically is. Anything that serves as a motivation will do. A true MacGuffin is essentially interchangeable. Its importance will generally be accepted completely by the story's characters, with minimal explanation. From the audience's perspective, the MacGuffin is not the point of the story.

Director/producer Alfred Hitchcock popularized both the term "MacGuffin" and the technique. In an interview with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock related 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.

Hitchcock defined the MacGuffin as the object around which the plot revolves, and as to what that object specifically is, "The audience don't care!"

For those of you wondering about the MacGuffin that I mentioned in Notorious, it is the uranium hidden in the wine bottles. It is the reason the story takes place, but could just as easily have been diamonds, gold, or rare wine. In fact, during production, there was discussion of changing it to diamonds to be more believable.

Other famous MacGuffins: The Maltese Falcon statutette from the um...Maltese Falcon. The briefcase from Pulp Fiction. The rug that "really tied the room together" in The Big Lebowski.