A McGuffin
| Posted in Movies | Posted on 31-08-2009
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A McGuffin
The master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock built some his most suspense filled movies around a key concept called a McGuffin. Many famous films of his like Notorious, North by Northwest and Psycho were triumphs of this aspect of story telling. What exactly is a McGuffin?
Alfred Hitchcock made movies for more than 50 years. He was one of the greatest story tellers who was able to make movies in all eras. He made silent movies, movies with sound, black and white movies, movies for the color era and movies for television. In every format of movie making, he had mastered his unique method of story telling. It is interesting to note that he had a number of techniques which he had converted into a number of rules or laws for interesting movie making. One of them is the McGuffin.
A McGuffin is ‘ A device or plot element that catches the viewer’s attention or drives the plot. It is generally something that every character is concerned with.’ The McGuffin is essentially something that the entire story is built around and yet has no real relevance.
In Notorious, it is the Uranium. In North by Northwest it is government documents. In Psycho it is $40,000. None of the audience are bothered about it, yet, the characters, the plot and everything else in the movie is tightly woven around it!
The McGuffin, thus is essentially a nothing around which everything is built. A device for creating tension, suspense and thrills.
Hey Sree, got this on wikipedia.
Interviewed in 1966 by François Truffaut, Alfred 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.”
Hey Georgie,
I presume you did not watch the video animation. It says the exact same thing. It is an animation based on an excerpt of an interview with Hitchcock where he says the above words.
That should have been the source for the Wikipedia article.
:)