The Secret That Doesn’t Matter – Hitchcock’s MacGuffin in Screenwriting, Then and Now

MZed Education

by Mascha DeikovaToday

Subscribe to How To

A MacGuffin is the thing everybody in the movie is chasing — a document, an object, a secret, an event. In general, it’s a plot device that gives the characters something to pursue. However, the strange trick of it is that the less the viewers actually care what it is, the better the story around it usually works. Letters, a glowing briefcase, a stack of tax receipts: on paper, none of these objects should be able to carry an entire plot on their backs. And yet they do, film after film, decade after decade. So what makes a MacGuffin actually work, and why did Hitchcock, of all people, insist that the less said about it, the better? Let’s find out!

Here’s a fun place to start: Hitchcock’s own favorite way of explaining the MacGuffin was a joke about a lion trap that doesn’t trap lions. Imagine two men are sitting in a train.

“What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?” asks the first man. “Oh, that’s a MacGuffin,” the other one answers. “What’s a MacGuffin?” “Well, it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.” “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.” “Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!”

What exactly is a MacGuffin?

Actually, the term didn’t originate from the maestro Alfred Hitchcock. He credited it to Angus MacPhail, a British screenwriter he worked with, who invented “MacGuffin” for exactly this kind of deliberately empty plot device. Hitchcock picked it up and turned it into one of the most famous pieces of film theory there is.

His clearest definition comes from the interview sessions with French filmmaker François Truffaut, later published as the book “Hitchcock/Truffaut” (1967): “The “MacGuffin” is the term we use to cover all that sort of thing: to steal plans or documents, or discover a secret, it doesn’t matter what it is. And the logicians are wrong in trying to figure out the truth of a MacGuffin, since it’s beside the point. The only thing that really matters is that in the picture the plans, documents, or secrets must seem to be of vital importance to the characters. To me, the narrator, they’re of no importance whatever.”

Simply put, it’s something that sets the plot in motion, and becomes insignificant as it is. As we know, Hitchcock’s filmmaking philosophy was built on suspense, not mystery – and suspense, in his view, comes from what the audience knows about the characters’ danger, not from what’s inside an envelope. If the MacGuffin were genuinely important, you’d stop and think about it. If it’s “nothing at all,” as he defined it later in his career, you keep watching the people instead.

The renowned director used the device constantly in his work. One example is hidden in “Psycho.“  It appears in the form of $40,000, which motivates Marion Crane’s actions. However, once she is killed in the famous shower scene early in the film, the money is forgotten, and Hitchcock never brings it up again.

Casablanca’s letters that nobody needs to read

A classic textbook example of a MacGuffin is an envelope of transit letters in “Casablanca.”

These are just pieces of paper that let the bearer leave a Nazi-occupied area for Lisbon, no questions asked. Nobody in the film ever explains who signs them, why they’re unquestionable, or how such a document could possibly exist. And nobody needs to – the moment Ugarte tells Rick he’s hiding them, every character in the film starts making decisions around papers we never see up close.

That’s the whole trick, isn’t it? The letters could be replaced with a suitcase of diamonds, a coded telegram, anything — the film would barely change. What matters is that Rick has them, everyone else wants them, and that tension is what actually drives the story.

Pulp Fiction’s briefcase as a MacGuffin you cannot throw away

Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” is another great example of taking Hitchcock’s theory and turning it into a perfect MacGuffin. Remember the suitcase that shines golden from within whenever it’s opened? Do we ever learn why? And what’s inside? No, we don’t. We just know that Vincent and Jules are happy about its contents. Just rewatch this scene:

Quentin Tarantino himself once explained this choice in an interview: “I like the idea that you open up the briefcase in “Pulp Fiction,” and I don’t tell you what’s in there, but it’s up to you to figure out what’s in there, and now that’s your movie.” He also added that if he tells us what’s in there, we’ll throw it away, and he doesn’t want us to. To be fair, I can totally relate. And the best part of it: when you Google this mysterious suitcase, you will still find chats and discussions where people guess what its contents were and exchange the craziest theories. So cool, right?

MacGuffin turned into grief itself

Okay, let’s take a look at the other possibility for using MacGuffin: not just as a trick, but as something that can genuinely break your heart. “A Ghost Story” by David Lowery is one of my favorite films of all time, and its MacGuffin might also be the gentlest one I know.

Attention: the subsequent paragraph has major plot spoilers, so please skip it if you haven’t watched the film and plan to.

After the tragic death of her husband and before moving out, a wife (portrayed by Rooney Mara) writes a note, tucks it into a crack in the wooden door frame of their house, and paints over it. Her husband — who has come back as a ghost —spends the rest of the film bound to that house, trying and failing to reach the note. It gets super existential at one point. Owners move in and out. Decades pass. The house gets torn down. Time loops all the way back to before it was even built, then forward again. Yet only when the ghost finally manages to pry the note loose and read it, does he disappear. He is free and can move on.

We never find out what the note says. The director, David Lowery, explained in an interview that it doesn’t matter as much as just knowing that he finally got it.

“Nothing written there would mean anything to the audience at that point, and it would just complicate that moment.”

A quote from the interview with The Hollywood Reporter

That’s so true! And it doesn’t matter what it says, to be honest. The note isn’t there to be solved. It’s just something that finally brings us to catharsis. The ghost is released, and we are released. This is usually the moment where I start crying – not out of pity or sadness, but of the overwhelming feeling of existing on this planet at this time. (Not sure I can explain this feeling in words, though.)

Is a tax audit a MacGuffin?

Now this one is a debatable one, so I’d like to hear your thoughts on it (leave them in the comments, please.) Also in an existential movie, yet completely different tonally, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the MacGuffin hides inside the most boring object imaginable: a shoebox of tax receipts.

Evelyn Wang is being audited by the IRS, and that audit is the entire reason her whole family is sitting in that government office on that specific day. It’s a wonderfully mundane inciting incident for a film about to blow up into infinite parallel universes, alternate selves, and a bagel (literally, a bagel) that contains everything. The receipts themselves never matter again once the multiverse plot kicks in. Can we still call them a MacGuffin then, when they lose all their attraction to characters, after the story accelerates and evolves? I believe we do.

Even if not, I still like the idea of using the most boring bureaucratic device possible (name me something more boring than a tax report!) to crack open a fantastically colourful, wild, and bizarre story about a mother, a daughter, and the multiverse. (By the way, we have an essay on this film, and you can read it here if you are interested.)

So why does “nothing at all” work so well?

Different genres, different decades, different reasons for reaching for this story device – and every single one of them works because the story never really needed the object. It needed characters who believed the MacGuffin mattered.

What do all these examples teach us? That as filmmakers, we don’t always need to make every detail make sense in the grand scheme of plot. Sometimes, “nothing at all” can help write something tense, emotional, and with high stakes. You just need a good human story around it.

What about you? How do you feel about this storytelling trick? Which MacGuffin has stuck with you the longest? The one you still remember, even though there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands. Please tell us in the comments about it!

Feature image: film stills from “Pulp Fiction” by Quentin Tarantino, 1994; and “A Ghost Story” by David Lowery, 2017.

Full disclosure: MZed is owned by CineD.