The McGuffin is a term Hitchcock coined for an object that didn’t have anything to do with the movie, but that moved the plot along. There was that weird statue that showed up at the end of North by Northwest, full of microfilm, or gefilte fish, or something. The stolen money at the beginning of Psycho was a McGuffin - what, you don’t remember the money at the beginning of Psycho? That’s because it had nothing to do with the story of the movie - it just moved the characters around.
Lots of filmmakers use McGuffins. In The Maltese Falcon, the titular falcon statue had nothing, really, to do with the story. The letters of transit in Casablanca make no sense, but they keep things moving. And that suitcase in Pulp Fiction has McGuffin written on it in letters so large you make them out from the International Space Station.
The director for the next Star Wars movie has been named - J. J. Abrams - and I’ve been a fan since Alias. There’s a lot of good stuff to say about him as a choice, especially in light of the two movie franchises he participated in - Mission Impossible and Star Trek.
Both great movies that I enjoyed.
But he McGuffinized both stories.
In Mission Impossible 3, everybody is after an identified weapon of mass destruction. The characters don’t even try to figure out what it is, they just run after it.
And in Star Trek, the romulans use Red Matter to travel through time and blow up planets.
So, I am worried that I’ll be sitting in the theater in a couple of years saying, “Ah, the Vorpnolian Compression. Of course! How will they ever wrest that from Darth Guffin?”
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