Saturday

Last week Alex mentioned that The Lady Vanishes contains a great example of a MacGuffin. I didn't know what this was and so looked it up on Wikipedia - it turns out it's a plot device that motivates the characters but has little or no relevance itself. In the case of the Hitchcock film (who apparently popularised the term) it is the tune the old lady is trying to remember - and indeed I remember thinking whilst watching the movie last week 'it's great how you never know what that means'. However, is it a true MacGuffin? I didn't think so, but I felt it would be a bit presumptuous of me - having only two minutes earlier discovered what it means - to tell Alex he was wrong. You see, a MacGuffin drives the plot forward, but the main characters in The Lady Vanishes only find out about the tune ten minutes from the end. What drives the plot forward is instead trying to find the old lady. Of course, MacGuffin is a vague and not very specific technical term, but it does seem that it is normally something that appears at the beginning of a film and slowly dwindles in importance. The briefcase in Pulp Fiction is perhaps a better example, but the narrative of that film is famously disjointed, so even then it's not clear. A lot of the time you'll have an object which is important to characters, but not important to the plot or the audience - for example there'll be a love story laid over the top which is more interesting - and this happens frequently in James Bond or Indiana Jones. So, our only conclusion can be that a MacGuffin is something of ambivalent, relational value, of importance to some, but none to others.