[We] have a name in the studio, and we call it the 'MacGuffin.' It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is most always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers.
--Alfred Hitchcock
I guess one of the perks of being a giant of western cinema is that you get to make up your own words and can expect others to start using them. Hitchcock's MacGuffin is a plot device that motivates the characters in a story. Since stories are about people, not objects, the MacGuffin is basically an excuse for action. It's that briefcase full of glowing stuff in Pulp Fiction, it's the big game in any sports movie, it's the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it's the Maltese Falcon. In Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, it's actually other characters -- the haunted children.
The MacGuffin could be called the fiction under the fiction -- it's an excuse for all the shooting or running around or freaking out or obsessing -- in Pulp Fiction, it could just as easily have been drugs, money, jewels, gold bars, etc. Tarantino didn't define his MacGuffin because it didn't matter what it was, it was just a pretense and he wanted his audience to know it. It was a post-modern jab at conventional storytelling.
Our time is defined by a MacGuffin -- The War on Terror. The story we're living is about the people, not the terrorism. The storytellers are also the actors, using their MacGuffin to bolster their historical importance, to consolidate their power, and to advance their sick ideals. Terrorism is the pretense, the story is the people.And not all people. Those locked down in our oubliettes or blown up on our battlefields are just the backdrop, the stuff going on outside the window while the main characters plot. It's only history's movers and shakers we're supposed to be paying attention to. We're supposed to applaud the Greatness of Bush, the Brilliance of Cheney. But the story is so unbelievable, the characters so bizarre, and their motivations so crazy that our attention is drawn to those details we're supposed to ignore -- the locked down and blown up. The story being told is just too ridiculous to pay much attention to and the MacGuffin is looking more and more like what it is -- the tool of a hamhanded fiction writer...
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