MacGuffin

MacGuffin

A MacGuffin is a plot device which is seen as important by the characters but not the audience.  It can be in the form of a goal or desired object or another something that is just being pursued. The MacGuffin is unimportant to the plot but can drive a story line.  The most common type of MacGuffin is an object, person or place. Other MacGuffins may be, victory, glory, survival and money, etc. MacGuffins can be referred to as plot coupons.  

Alfred Hitchcock popularized both the term "MacGuffin" and the technique, in the 1935 film ''The 39 Steps.'' Hitchcock explained the term "MacGuffin" in a 1939 lecture at Columbia University: 

''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 almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers"

Many of the films we have watched by the Director Alfred Hitchcock use a MacGuffin in the plot.  More recent films don't always use a MacGuffin as much as older films do.