MACGUFFIN
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| Alfred Hitchcock. 1947. Photographed by Irving Penn |
The word MacGuffin often is attributed to Alfred Hitchcock’s friend, the screenwriter Angus MacPhail. I don’t care too much about the word’s origins, but I do find myself drawn to the idea for reasons I can’t quite explain.
Here’s what Al had to say about it to some Columbia students in 1939:
In regard to the tune, 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.
That “mechanical element” is usually a concrete, physical thing. Sometimes it’s a thing that propels the story forward but is only tangentially related to what the story is about. Think of Lebowski’s Rug or Marsellus Wallace’s black briefcase. Other times it is the climactic high-stakes thing that spells success or failure for the heroes. Think Infinity Gems and Arks of the Covenant.
MacGuffins are popular tools, specifically for highly-visual, highly-engaging, non-serialized media—i.e., movies. And without them, it would be hard to make really compelling, easy-to-understand, action climaxes. Imagine Lord of the Rings but in the real world where “power over others” is not a manifestation of a ring but is merely an abstract concept that arises out of a complex socio-political ecosystem and is made possible by a conflagration of individual and collective psychological forces. How do we know who wins? Or worse, how do we know who’s supposed to win? In that world—the real world—one person’s hero is another’s villain. And even when we have agreed upon heroes, today’s heroes can easily be the villains of tomorrow, or next year, or next century. It’s so messy and unsatisfying. But when Gollum and the One Ring fall into Mount Doom and Sauron becomes forever powerless, we can close the book or walk out of the theater and feel full.
Sometimes, Macguffin’s get silly. Take Winter Soldier, a movie that, if I’m remembering correctly, chose a USB drive to represent a crazily advanced destroy-the-world algorithm. And where the final battle had the fate of humanity hinging on Cap swapping out SIM cards on a port that someone chose to place in an exposed central cavity inside a flying killbot aircraft carrier. Was the set piece entertaining? Yes. And it was totally clear what Cap had to do to win and it was totally clear when he succeeded, because we had to watch him insert this physical thing into this other physical thing. It was all completely and totally clear and all completely and totally fun to watch. And when the movie ended and you thought about it for a minute, it was also pretty fucking dumb.
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One of my favorite movies is Inside Llewyn Davis. In fact, I just watched it the other day.
It’s one of the quieter, gentler, and less popular Coen Brother films, but I can fall into its muted winter palette any time. And, even though he was given a difficult character, the pre-franchised Oscar Isaac plays the pretentious, misanthropic, manchild of Llewyn so charismatically that I really feel for him through his highs and many lows like I would a true fellow traveler. The character of Llewyn is difficult mostly because what he wants in life is validation for his artistic integrity. But since he can’t get that in any profitable way, he seems unable or unwilling to practice integrity in any other aspect of his life. He uses people and belittles people and thinks himself a victim in a world built for squares.
The orange cat is not a true MacGuffin. It doesn’t necessarily spur action for Llewyn. But it’s not a perfect symbol either. It’s more of a character/object that accompanies Llewyn as he desperately tries to find someone who will value him. The poor cat indicates, in a way, Llewyn’s artistic health as he quests for his holy grail of validation, kinda like the yellow chrysanthemums in E.T. (And even though the actual world of the film includes at least three cats, you have to think of them, I will argue, as a single narrative device with an arc that follows Llewyn’s.)
First the cat is displaced from its home, then lost to Llewyn, then found again but rejected by its family because, well, it’s not the same cat. That’s Llewyn: homeless, adrift, scorned, alone. Eventually, the cat is abandoned on some Ohio expressway, left to die with a junkie John Goodman, as Llewyn makes one last ditch effort to make it in the biz. When Llewyn doesn’t, he hits the cat on the return trip, and the cat, like Llewyn’s artistic resolve, limps finally and tragically into the winter woods to die. But then, Llewyn fucks up abandoning his dreams and, like true magic, the cat reappears, reunited with his family, all on its own. Stasis is restored and the next time Llewyn leaves the apartment he makes sure the cat stays safe. Llewyn has, despite what some critics say, learned something from his week: never let the cat out ever again.
Thus, at the close of the film, Llewyn is spared from a life of merely “existing” just long enough to see a young Dylan appear, just as everything is about to happen. Will he fuck it up? Is Llewyn, the old-school folk artist playing standards, about to be replaced by the singer-songwriter cultural icon? Is this story a tragedy about the death of an artist, how artistic success has little to do with talent and everything to do with luck? Or an uplifting farce? About how Llewyn can’t even give up his dreams right and fate kept him in the game long enough to be in the scene when the scene exploded? To what is Llewyn saying au revoir to at the end? Himself? Or any doubts he has in himself? Is that final goodbye a pathetic whimper, a knowing acceptance of an absurd hand of fate, or maybe a last glib fuck you to anyone who tries to knock him down?
I don’t know. Every time I watch the film, I feel a little differently about it.
What I do know is that there’s no hero by that final cut to black. Every character pretty much sucks in their own way. However, despite all of that, I still want Llewyn to succeed. I want his fictional world to recognize the talent that I, a twenty-first century audience member, see in his performances, especially that heartfelt final one. I want someone to appear and help him grieve the loss of Mike. I want Llewyn to get what he needs, just once, and not merely what he deserves.
But that ain't life. We often don’t get what we are owed by the world, because the world owes us nothing. We can make a beautiful noise, but we can’t make anyone hear it.
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I really like thinking about objects in the worlds of my fiction and in my own world. I, personally, like certain types of things. Books. Lamps. Flowers. Cups with saucers. I like the colors of these things and their textures and any details that show age and use. I like old things. I like handheld things. Inside Llewyn Davis is a movie filled with beautiful, old things.
I’m also really interested in how things—even abstract things like validation and grief—give our worlds a certain shape. They populate our lives with sounds and colors and textures. They can set our lives to a certain tempo, imbue it with a certain quality of light.
And there’s a moment when I, from a writerly point of view, think about symbols and objects and push them as literary devices until they become simply the things of life. Things that are as meaningful as any of the things in our real lives are. My objects are my own characterization. They are the imagery of my life. They are symbols too, in their own way, representing something personal and abstract. That’s why I chose them.
But then I remember that it is that choice that really distinguishes real life things from their storytelling counterparts. They are narrative devices—symbols, motifs, and MacGuffins too—because they are not chosen. They are thrust upon characters to illuminate what is hidden and push them towards what's next. They are our friend's cats that we lose. Or they are the green lights across the bay, the white whales that just gotta be slayed. Or they are the jewels you need to steal, the top-secret papers you have to recover from being stolen. And when we follow the interesting little story about the necklace, or the papers, or the cat, or the One Ring, or artistic success, or the true love, or the last battle, or whatever the holy grail of the moment is, we get tricked into sticking around for that scene where we’re face to face with the real, desperately needed thing: respect, security, peace, companionship, relief. And hopefully, when that scene appears—if it’s done right—it shocks us a little, like when we catch ourselves unexpectedly in a mirror and see something we didn’t expect.
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References:
“FAQs.” ‘The MacGuffin’ Web Pages. https://hitchinfo.net/faqs.html. Accessed 23 July 2023.
Garg, Anu. “McGuffin or MacGuffin.” A Word a Day. https://wordsmith.org/words/mcguffin.html. Accessed 23 July 2023.
Marshall, Rick. “Here’s what a MacGuffin is, and 15 killer examples that made movies memorable.” Digital Trends. https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/best-movie-macguffins/. Accessed 23 July 2023.
Penn, Irving. "Alfred Hitchcock." National Portrait Gallery, 1994, https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw09451/Alfred-Hitchcock.
"The Maltese Falcon." Internet Movie Database, 1941, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033870/mediaviewer/rm1808434944?ref_=ttmi_mi_all_pbl_20. Accessed 23 July 2023.