So there's this man on a train, right?
And he sees this other guy who's carrying a package
and he asks him what it is.
And the guy says, "It's a MacGuffin."
And he asks, "What's a MacGuffin?"
And the guy says,
"A MacGuffin is a tool for finding things on the internet
that have never been turned into porn."
And he says, "But there isn't anything on the internet
that's never been turned into porn!"
And the package guy responds,
"Well, then I guess there's no MacGuffin!"
A rough approximation of this joke was used by Alfred Hitchcock
in an interview to explain his use of the term "MacGuffin"
which had been coined by his screenwriter friend Angus McPhail,
the proud owner of my favorite name in history.
Hitchcock also described the MacGuffin as
"the thing that the spies are after but the audience doesn't care."
Basically, a functionally meaningless and interchangable object
that nonetheless drives the plot by being the center of attention
and usually the object of a major conflict
wherein everyone is trying to get it.
Now, while Hitchcock popularized the term and McPhail coined it, neither of them invented the concept.
Some decades earlier, silent film actress Pearl White starred in a number of movies
where everyone would be chasing after something, like a roll of film.
She starred in so many of these that she started just calling the items in question
"weenies"
because they were functionally indistinguishable and it didn't really matter what they were.
And long before film was a thing,
the Holy Grail was an archetypical MacGuffin for the Arthurian knights:
an object of desire with no discernible function being sought after because everybody wanted it.
Now, "MacGuffin" as a term gets thrown around a little... loosely.
It's often treated as synonymous with a plot device, which is a mistake.
While MacGuffins are a kind of plot device, most plot devices are not MacGuffins.
A plot device is anything that exists solely to propel the plot.
For example, a Chekhov's Gun is a plot device introduced near the beginning of the story
and used once near the end of the story.
Like a gun left on a table
or a giant dam everybody really hopes doesn't explode.
It's distinctly not a MacGuffin, which is very specifically an object drives the plot only by being desired.
A defining quality of a MacGuffin is that, on some level, it's pretty interchangeable.
Any story that revolves around a MacGuffin could theoretically revolve around any MacGuffin with minimal reshuffling.
These spies are trying to steal the data disk with all the undercover agents on it?
Well, now they're trying to steal a volatile uranium core for an unstable super-weapon.
Or a very big diamond.
Or a pretty cool gun.
Or the Holy Grail.
This hero is playing keep-away with a priceless artifact?
Could just as easily be a treasure map.
Or a stolen artwork.
Or an adorable baby space-gremlin.
Just swap out why people want it and the story functions exactly the same.
For instance, the Rabbit's Foot from Mission: Impossible III is so interchangeable,
we literally never find out what it does.
It could literally be a blank disk and nothing would change about the story.
Now, this is not to say that MacGuffins have to be useless to fit the definition;
they can have all kinds of theoretical powers and functions.
But if those uses never actually factor into the plot, then the object stays a MacGuffin.
If Chekhov's gun is never fired, it's not Chekhov's gun.
It's just Chekhov's shiny-wall-decoration.
This is, by definition, pretty vague, so let's throw out some examples.
Any time the main characters have a briefcase, and everybody wants the briefcase,
but we never see what's in the briefcase, that's a MacGuffin.
It's only relevant to the story because everybody wants it.
The Maltese Falcon is almost the archetypical MacGuffin
a very sparkly statue that a whole bunch of people really want
and the entire rest of the movie follows the race to get it.
Unobtanium from Avatar
(remember, that movie that made nearly $3 billion but nobody can quote a single line from)
Anyway, unobtanium is a MacGuffin
and it's actually a very illustrative example of one subtle aspect of the MacGuffin trope -
a MacGuffin doesn't need to be useless; however, it's use can never actually impact the plot.
The humans in Avatar want unobtanium
because it's a room-temperature superconductor they want to use to solve their energy crisis.
But the conductive properties of unobtanium literally never matter.
It has a theoretical use, but that theoretical use never really becomes practical.
Similarly, the Ark of the Covenant from Raiders of the Lost Ark is a MacGuffin.
Everybody wants it, but
surprise!
once the Nazis open it, they melt into strawberry jam.
This MacGuffin has a use -
instantaneously murdering anyone who opens it.
This use even factors into the story when it melts a bunch of Nazis.
But this doesn't stop it from being a MacGuffin
because the Nazis only wanted the shiny box
and didn't realize it was a face-melty super-weapon.
A MacGuffin that kills you instantly when you touch it is still a MacGuffin,
just a pretty spicy one.
This interchangeability inherent to the MacGuffin trope
helps us figure out some things that aren't MacGuffins.
For instance, the One Ring is surprisingly not a MacGuffin!
Because if you swap it out for an Infinity Stone, or a sparkly bird statue, or the Death Star plans,
then you lose the extremely important character arc of how the Ring poisons everything it touches
and how much it weighs on Frodo and gradually strips all the hope out of his life, leaving him permanently diminished.
This is, one could argue, the entire point of the story
and because this trait is specific to the ring, it's not interchangeable,
not even for other cursed artifacts.
The malevolence of the Ring is unique enough that it's vital to it's own narrative arc.
Let's take a hot minute to talk about the Infinity Stones.
These bad boys have all kinds of crazy powers
in theory.
In practice, 5-6 of them are basically just video-game power-ups that do whatever the movie wants them to do.
And as proof - most of you don't remember what they can individually do
which is pretty shameful, because their powers are in their names.
The Space Stone lets you warp space to teleport.
woooo
and make... really good spaceship engines
that give you superpowers when they explode.
Neat!
And also make... blue-energy Nazi weapons
...okay?
In Captain America, everybody wants it because... energy reasons.
Nobody uses it and then it Ark-of-the-Covenant's-Red-Skulls and falls into the ocean.
oops. MacGuffin
The Power Stone
(the purple one, in case you forgot)
is in this weird space where, like, five different groups want it
but only one of them actually wants it for what it can do.
Ronin wants a cool power-up so he can blow up a planet
but instead of just doing it, he postures enough that the good guys can hand-hold their way to a victory.
The Power Stone makes everything kinda purple and glowy for a bit
and then it blows up the bad guy and that's the extent of its use.
The Mind Stone lets you do telepathy and stuff,
and it also made Quicksilver super fast somehow,
and it gave Vision sentience for 23 and a half minutes of screen time.
The Aether, the Reality Stone, which was the red space juice from Thor 3
- the Thor nobody watched -
is literally never used!
It's stuck in Jane Foster,
then it's stuck in Malekith
and it has no appreciable effect on either of them
outside of making Malekith maybe kinda stronger.
This is the stone that's supposed to be able to warp reality.
And it gets *no* use.
Total MacGuffin.
The exception to the rule is the Time Stone
which features in Doctor Strange as a Chekhov's Gun.
It lets the user manipulate time
but Strange is warned early on that using it irresponsibly could lead to branches in time or time loops.
Spoiler Alert!
This is how he beats the bad guy and also how he fixes Infinity War.
Not a MacGuffin!
Actually factors in to the plot
and more than that, it's the key to the thematic conflict
between Dormammu, who thinks time is gross, and Strange, who's a big fan of the linear progression of time.
Nice work, writers!
And then last and also least is the Soul Stone,
the devastatingly powerful artifact with the ability
to single-handedly kill 28% of the franchise's female protagonists.
I'm just kidding. I literally have no idea what this thing does because it's never explained.
Thanos just needs it to complete the set and do the snappening.
The Soul Stone could have been literally anything,
because in the story, it was nothing.
That's a MacGuffin, baby!
In fact, a matched set of MacGuffins, like the Infinity Stones, is sometimes referred to as "Plot Coupons,"
otherwise meaningless objects that you can trade in to advance the plot.
If somebody needs to collect a set of things that are minimally useful on their own
but will do something extremely impressive when they're all brought together,
then that's definitely going to happen, because there's nothing else interesting you can do with them.
And when I say "minimally useful," I'm including things like "powers up the bad guy,"
because, honestly, the plot was probably going to do that on it's own anyway.
In fact, this is a useful segue into some categorization.
See, even though MacGuffins are functionally interchangeable,
there is some interesting subdivision within that trope.
For instance, the "powerup" MacGuffin is an object that powers up the holder.
Makes them stronger, glowier, floatier, maybe a little more evil.
This is just a way to make the bad guy an intimidating boss fight
when they get their hands on the MacGuffin in the third act.
And, yeah, for whatever reason, the heroes basically never use this.
Maybe it's an evil power-up or something.
Now I think it's important to note that this doesn't apply to magic weapons or magical choosy artifacts.
Those things are useful on their own merit
and have a function beyond initiating conflict.
Powerup MacGuffins basically just enable a villain's third-act power-up
which is a fairly standard Diabolus ex Machina.
It's not something special or unique to the MacGuffin.
But the bad guy better hope that this isn't actually an Instakill MacGuffin,
the kind of MacGuffin that kills you instantly.
This MacGuffin, functionally speaking, has no other use.
It's just there to kill whoever messes with it.
This also serves a plot-specific role because it kills whoever wins the race to the MacGuffin,
usually a bad guy, granting the heroes a humble victory
and turning the whole thing into a bit of a shaggy dog story
where the point is that the ending is unsatisfying.
This is a pretty common moral for MacGuffin stories, actually.
Since a MacGuffin is by nature meaningless,
it's very easy to turn the whole thing into a morality tale
about the futility and dangers of greed, or whatever.
The Instakill MacGuffin is the logical conclusion of this narrative trope,
guaranteeing that whoever finally gets their hands on the MacGuffin
will have just enough time to regret their life choices before biting it.
On a similar note, but a little less murder-y, is the Worthless MacGuffin,
a MacGuffin that turns out to have been worthless.
See, all MacGuffins have some kind of informed value getting the characters to pursue them:
fabulous wealth, ultimate power, whatever.
But since, by their nature, MacGuffins can never really be used in the story without losing their MacGuffinness,
their value is basically theoretical.
We don;t actually know if the big hunking diamond is real,
only that all the characters think it is.
And sometimes, it turns out they were wrong.
The Worthless MacGuffin is another shaggy dog twist that invalidates the whole story.
The glowing briefcase was empty,
the data drive was switched for a blank one,
the sparkly bird statue was actually a shockingly convincing papier-mâché replica,
whatever.
This trope plays on the inherent meaninglessness of the MacGuffin
by informing the characters of what the audience already knew -
that the MacGuffin chase is pointless because the object is completely interchangeable
and all that matters is that it's wanted.
Clever heroes will often use sleight of hand to hand off a fake MacGuffin copy to the other characters
who will pursue it just as ferociously as they chased the real thing
because all that matters is that they want it.
This variant also covers "The real MacGuffin was the friends we made along the way(!)"
where the characters are pursuing some neat thing and then it turns out that the thing isn't there,
but the journey was really worth it.
This is very popular in treasure-hunting stories.
By far the biggest twist in National Treasure is that they actually found the treasure at the end.
But sometimes the MacGuffin's a real thing.
For instance, many spy stories focus on Tactical MacGuffins -
where the MacGuffin in question has some kind of implicit tactical use.
Most commonly, its a component for, or the plans to, some kind of terrible weapon.
Obviously, this thing has a theoretical use, namely making a scary weapon happen,
but it only sometimes gets that far.
This is the kind of thing that can start out as a MacGuffin
but become something more over the course of the story.
Like, if the weapon actually gets completed at the start of Act III and now the heroes have to stop it from going off.
Also, sometimes, the tactical MacGuffin is something like an antidote or a vaccine to some kind of bio-weapon.
And the heroes just need to get it from point A to point B so the cool off-screen lab people can use it to fix the plot.
These MacGuffins are essentially keys that unlock new parts of the plot.
If the bad guys snag the weapon plans,
they get used to unlock the-part-where-the-bad-guys-have-the-scary-weapon.
If the good guys bring the antidote home,
it unlocks the nobody-dying-horribly ending.
These ones toe the line of MacGuffinhood
due to their implicit function in the narrative
but they are still very interchangeable and will almost never see any use
outside being delivered to whatever base they're supposed to go to.
And finally, we have the Walking MacGuffin.
See, not all MacGuffins are objects -
sometimes, they're people!
People lacking in agency who mostly get treated like objects.
The archetypical fairy-tale damsel locked in the tower fits this category
but this is also where you get your standard escort missions
escorting thoroughly useless character A through hostile environment B.
A lot of the time, this character is a baby or a child
otherwise incapable of taking care of themselves that the hero has to watch out for.
This also applies to characters who secretly contain MacGuffins,
were magically transformed from MacGuffins,
or are in some way permanently bonded to a MacGuffin.
These character archetypes don't actually have to be MacGuffins themselves
but if they're KO'd, abducted, or otherwise stripped of their agency,
then they basically end up as MacGuffins anyway.
However, just because a character started their life as a magic crystal statuette given life by arcane sorceries to disguise their precious nature from the world,
doesn't mean this character has to just sit around and take whatever the world deals them.
In order for a character to be a MacGuffin,
they really need to be impressively useless.
However, there's a lot of drama to be had with a character who has agency
but is being treated like a MacGuffin because they're connected to a MacGuffin.
Something to play with, maybe.
Now, I mentioned that MacGuffins don't actually need to stay MacGuffins for the whole story.
It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes MacGuffins transcend their MacGuffin-y nature
and become genuinely relevant to the plot.
This is very common in any story where the MacGuffin is an egg.
(And yep, that happens weirdly frequently.)
The MacGuffin egg will basically be agency-less and interchangeable right up until it hatches
and becomes... something.
Whatever it is, it has more personality than a rock, which is a major step up.
It's also pretty common in a story where the MacGuffins form a chain of plot coupons
that the characters need to assemble into something bigger.
Usually, when the MacGuffins are all mashed together, something much more useful comes out,
like a giant robot, or a wish-granting dragon, or the Unstoppable Exodia.
This thing is much less likely to be a MacGuffin, even if it's probably still a plot device.
Also, sometimes, the MacGuffin will turn out to be a choosy magical artifact
that only works in the hands of one special person
and it's completely inert and useless in the hands of anyone else.
This'll bounce around as a MacGuffin for a while
until the chosen one finds it and suddenly it's a magical weapon with a lot more impact on the plot.
Now, I do wanna say
MacGuffins get thrown around as kind of a bad thing.
But while they're kinda non-entities, there's nothing actually inherently wrong with them.
I mean, there are tons of great stories where the pivotal focus of the narrative
is a functionally interchangeable thing that everybody just wants.
And that is a great recipe for character drama and action.
I mean, it's like the simplest plot in existence: people want thing.
But simple isn't bad. It's a stable scaffolding that gives you room to play.
And honestly, it's kinda nuts that we can write entire stories that just center on an axis of nothing.
You can write incredibly wacky character drama where the motive of every single character
is... empty.
Blank.
Insert-thing-here.
For instance, loads of adventure narratives are centered on chasing down MacGuffins.
Peak example: the entire Uncharted franchise
is basically Nathan Drake chasing after one MacGuffin after another.
In the first game, it's the golden sarcophagus El Dorado,
which turns out to be an instakill MacGuffin containing a deadly virus.
In the second game, it's the Cintamani stone which turns out to be an evil powerup MacGuffin.
Then, in the third game, it's a brass vessel full of evil genies that poison the water supply
(I think. I had to check the wiki.)
But it gets chucked back into the water before it could be used for anything.
And then, in the fourth game, it's the treasure of infamous pirate Henry Avery
which is miraculously completely uncursed and harmless.
But it manages to drive a complex, character-driven narrative about the dangers of greed
as this completely mundane treasure drove an entire pirate colony to destruction
and threatens the protagonist with the same.
And only Nathan Drake is level-headed enough to not let himself be consumed by the same greed.
The bad guy is even physically crushed by the gold.
It's still a MacGuffin, but it's one that drives some very intense character arcs.
Now, MacGuffin-centric story-lines do normally fall into one of these categories -
the generic, baseline everyone-wants-the-thing ones,
the "We can't let the bad guys get this so we gotta play keep-away" ones,
the "We gotta get the MacGuffin from point A to point B
"but unfortunately half a million dudes just jumped out of the underbrush
"with the signs on our sub-plots" one,
and the gotta-catch-em-all ones where they're racing to collect all the MacGuffins before anyone else does.
These are very simple, by necessity.
But, again, they serve as good frameworks for character-driven plots.
When the story is simple, the characters have a little more freedom to be complex.
In short, MacGuffins are goofy and often kinda maligned,
but honestly, I think they're totally inoffensive storywise.
Baby Yoda's a MacGuffin and you guys all love him.
Have a heart.
So... yeah!