There's a certain narrative device that I see in just about every major Hollywood blockbuster, and it's often used
well...
lazily. If you watched the recent
Justice League movie, you'll know what I'm talking about.
Maybe you thought to yourself at some point during the film, really they've got to get some magical cubes again?
And while it's comical to look at the many, many similarities between Justice League
and the Avengers, what's also true is that both the mother boxes and the tesseract are
examples of a much broader plot device called a MacGuffin.
"Can you explain what a MacGuffin is?" "A MacGuffin
you see in most films about spies.
It is a thing that the spies are after. It's always called the thing that the
characters on the screen worry about but the audience don't care."
"Where is the ring?"
"Where is the Codex, Kal?"
"Where is the trigger? Where is it? Where is it?"
"I can get it! I can almost reach it, dad!"
It's the thing that sets the plot in motion; an object that the heroes and villains can battle over.
It's the sacred artifact; the super weapon; the money in the vault of every heist movie.
You're most likely to encounter them in science fiction, fantasy or spy movies
but there’s a lot of potential pitfalls for storytellers when it comes to MacGuffins.
The first is right up there in the description. The audience doesn't care about the MacGuffin itself, which
we'll get to in a minute. The bigger problem is now while a MacGuffin is a really easy way to introduce
conflict into a story,
it's often very shallow conflict. The story can start with a bang if the characters are battling over a possession of something valuable
but I find that the more emphasis put on that simple conflict, the duller the story.
It's why Justice League is so forgettable. They spend 95% of the movie talking about some weird gray space cubes
It is possible to write superhero movies and fantasy sci-fi spy movies without this trope
but if you absolutely need to use a MacGuffin to kick off your movie,
then here are five tactics that have made some of the most memorable MacGuffins so effective.
Number 1) Try not to make it a weapon of mass destruction
maybe?
Plenty of fine movies have been made off of the premise of: stop the guy from getting the thing that ends the world.
But if you're going to go there, you sort of write yourself into a box
because now the only way the movie can end is with the characters playing hot potato over the bomb. The MacGuffin
overtakes the rest of the movie. See, a MacGuffin is useful when kicking off the conflict of a story
but it doesn't have to be ever-present or even all that important by the end. Take a look at some of the most famous examples
of this device. The word "Rosebud" in Citizen Kane kicks off the story
but then the momentum of the characters takes over. The same is true of The Maltese Falcon, a statue that
initiates a mystery and then a love story. By the end of the movie, we're much more focused on what will happen to Sam and
Bridget than we are on who ends up with the statue. And in Pulp Fiction, the mysterious
briefcase sort of floats through the story. The fact that we never see what's inside is itself a commentary on the
emptiness of this narrative device, because what they're fighting over doesn't really matter. What matters is how the
characters fight over it and the decisions that they make.
Number 2)
Build mystery around the MacGuffin. Okay, so Harry Potter and Indiana Jones are very different characters
but they have very similar stories, don't they? And that's because both of them are absolutely
riddled with MacGuffins like the Ark of the Covenant, the Philosopher's Stone, the Holy Grail and the Horcruxes.
But unlike the
aforementioned Motherboxes and other
unsatisfying MacGuffins, the magical objects in Harry Potter and Indiana Jones are cloaked in mystery.
They're usually not even on screen at all until the very end, so they never have time to get boring. The characters have to solve
a dozen riddles and brave obstacle courses just to get to them, and their exact properties are often obscured until the last second.
This is one of the reasons I think many people didn’t enjoy the fourth Indiana Jones movie because any mystique the crystal skull might have had sort of
evaporates once you start tossing it around like airport luggage!
Number 3) Use an anti MacGuffin.
Okay, so I just made that word up...
so let's define it. In an early episode of the best TV show you didn't watch, The Leftovers,
protagonist, Kevin Garvey, is tasked with recovering a stolen
baby Jesus doll for the school's nativity scene. So the doll is our MacGuffin...
or is it? If we define MacGuffins as something the audience doesn't care about but the characters do, then what
differentiates the baby Jesus doll is that it is something the audience doesn't care about and the characters don't either.
Just about everyone involved in the recovery of the doll is doing it out of obligation,
convinced that someone else will care if the doll is missing. Kevin finally agrees to get it
but then it just kind of shows up on his doorstep. When he announces that he will personally return it, the collective response from the
people is "Meh." As the dance is over, I am personally gonna be delivering him back to the manger so...
there's that."
And any religious meaning it may have held is robbed from it when it is replaced by a second doll. And at the end of the
episode, it's ultimately tossed out into the side of the road,
forgotten like the faith it represents in the world of that show. This sort of anti MacGuffin is used to reflect the nihilistic
worldview of the story
but in the process it provides an interesting framework to reinvent this particular story element, make the characters resent
having to search for the MacGuffin, and milk that internal conflict for all it's worth.
Number 4) Make the MacGuffin a character we like. When making the original Star Wars movie, George Lucas disagreed with Hitchcock's
original definition of a MacGuffin. He believed that the audience should care very deeply about this part of the story
and that's where R2-D2 comes in. Now, technically the actual MacGuffin
here is the plan for the Death Star
but since the plans are essentially inseparable from our plucky droid, until the final act of the movie anyway,
they might as well be one in the same. We might not be
invested in who ends up with the plans when the movie begins, but we are almost
immediately invested in the safety of R2-D2 and later BB-8.
Because the movie would be boring if it was just about the Death Star plans.
And finally... Number 5) Make the MacGuffin symbolic of the theme.
Now this should be the
absolute bare minimum to ask from a MacGuffin. My favorite example of it is in The Lego Movie. In that movie, the characters are fighting
over the Kragle, which we learn is actually a
bottle of Krazy Glue. The villain wants to use it to glue all of the Lego in place, reflecting his ideology of
conformity. While the heroes want to stop him because they believe in freedom of expression. Yes, even three years on I'm still impressed these guys
figured out a way to make the two major play styles of Lego:
following the instructions versus doing whatever, into the theme of a movie because every element of a story should ideally
connect to the theme. Okay, a lazily conceived MacGuffin can drag down a story and make it feel generic.
And I feel that's what happened in Justice League and in a lot of similar movies. Of course, when crafting a story, it's much more
important to focus on characters.
But as we've seen in some of the examples listed here, an effective MacGuffin can bring the characters into focus and
elevate the story. Or, you know, challenge yourself to avoid using this device entirely!
"Let it go."
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