MacGuffin

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This article is about the plot device. For the block cipher, see MacGuffin (cipher).

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

A MacGuffin is a plot device that holds no meaning or purpose of its own except to motivate the characters and advance the story. The term is usually used in films, especially thrillers. For instance, the briefcase in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is a MacGuffin (and a nod to Kiss Me Deadly). The contents are never shown; that section of the plot is not about the briefcase so much as what happens because of it. In the film Ronin, 'the case' is also a classic MacGuffin.

The term "MacGuffin" was invented by Alfred Hitchcock, who made extensive use of MacGuffins in his films. One example of a MacGuffin in Hitchcock's movies is the bottle of "radioactive diamonds" in Notorious: it is the reason the story takes place, but it otherwise means nothing. The story could just as easily have used "uranium" (originally meant as the contents of the bottle), gold or extraordinary rare wine as the plot device.

The best Hitchcock MacGuffin is considered by film scholars to be the one used in North by Northwest. In this movie, the MacGuffin is the character of "George Kaplan", who is being chased by the enemy spies. Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is mistaken for Kaplan by the spies, and so they chase him instead. Thornhill spends the course of the movie trying to find George Kaplan himself without realizing that George Kaplan does not even exist. Both the hero and the villains of the movie are chasing nothing more than a puff of hot air, making this a true MacGuffin.

Interviewed in 1966 by Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock illustrated the term "MacGuffin" with 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."