In some kinds of novels and movies, the plot rides on a special object that’s absolutely necessary for the story to work, but doesn’t really do anything at all — even in the story — and in some cases it doesn’t even appear. That object is a MacGuffin. He probably didn’t come up with the term, but Alfred Hitchcock was one of the first to mention it, in 1939: “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 always the necklace and in spy stories it is always the papers. We just try to be a little more original.”
Some MacGuffins are pretty famous. The Maltese Falcon is a movie entirely about a MacGuffin — the falcon — and the twist at the end (spoiler alert) is that the one in the film is discovered to be a fake. Another famous one is the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. The two main characters spend the whole movie trying to hold onto “the case,” which they’re supposed to deliver to their boss. Whenever anybody looks into “the case,” something inside glows and they always ask “is that what I think it is?” But the case is always opened at an angle blocking the audience’s view. You never find out what’s in it.
The same gag was used in the movie Ronin, which is essentially an extended chase across Europe for another case (in this instance, designed to hold ice skates), which everybody wants. Several of the characters ask “what’s in the case,” but nobody ever answers.
Hitchcock himself explained the MacGuffin more completely in an interview in the 1960s: “The theft of secret documents was the original MacGuffin. So ‘the MacGuffin’ is the term we use to cover all that sort of thing: to steal plans or documents, or discover a secret, it doesn’t matter what it is. And the logicians are wrong in trying to figure out the truth of a MacGuffin, since it’s beside the point. The only thing that really matters is that in the picture the plans, documents, or secrets must seem to be of vital importance to the characters. To me, the narrator, they’re of no importance whatsoever.”
Nobody knows exactly where the term “MacGuffin” came from. Hitchcock told a story about its origin that isn’t particularly revealing: “‘There is a bloke on a train,’ says the English director. ‘He sees a package, and asked what it is. Man says it’s a MacGuffin. Other man asks what is a MacGuffin? Other cove says a MacGuffin is an apparatus for trapping lions in the Adirondacks. ‘But there are no lions in the Adirondacks,’ other bloke says. ‘Then this thing is no MacGuffin,’ second lad says.”
When Wilkie Collins wrote The Moonstone (considered the first detective novel) in 1868, he invented many of the conventions that detective stories still use — and the biggest one was the moonstone itself. It was a stolen gem — but of course, it was also the MacGuffin.
