Moving Target… using thematic MacGuffins to focus a story
by Damon Suede
Modern readers are not what they once
were. In the 19th century, a combination of middle-class literacy
and mass-market printing created armies of readers fascinated by
complexity and digression. While overlaps exist between film and
fiction, the differences are vast and fundamental. Fiction excels at
subjective, internal transformation but film favors external action
and concrete goals. Hollywood’s output eroded patience, teaching
modern audiences to expect simpler, more linear entertainment.
Gradually books have adapted to that altered public appetite with
regard to subjects and their objects.
Film plots have to be so streamlined and
audience friendly that literal
objects become critical to the filmmaking process: innocents to
rescue, weapons to find, wealth to steal, and marriages to manage.
It’s always easier to take a picture of
something,
and for many movies the exact nature of the thing is almost
irrelevant.
Alfred Hitchcock called this kind of overarching story bait
a MacGuffin. A MacGuffin is physical plot device which serves as the
linchpin of a story’s suspense by providing a focus for all actions,
a specific target of pursuit and obsession, visible on screen and
concrete in conflict, without agency of its own, which gives
characters something to struggle over. Classic examples include:
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The Maltese Falcon (The Maltese Falcon)
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The Philosopher’s Stone, the Chamber of Secrets, the Deathly Hallows, (Harry Potter and… all of the above, notice that the MacGuffins provide the titles)
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The Pearl (The Pearl)
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The Arkenstone (The Hobbit)
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The letters of transit (Casablanca)
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El Corazon (Romancing the Stone)
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The Ark of the Covenant (Raiders of the Lost Ark)
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The Letter (The Letter)
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The Golden Compass, the Subtle Knife, the Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials)
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The Queen’s diamond studs (The Three Musketeers)
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King Solomon’s Mines (King Solomon’s Mines)
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The Archive (The Dresden Files)
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The White Rabbit (Alice in Wonderland)
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The Death Star plans (Star Wars)
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The Holy Grail (Arthurian legend)
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The One Ring of Sauron (Lord of the Rings…although superfans grouse at the notion it’s inanimate)
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Helen of Troy (any story based on the Trojan War)
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Rosebud (Citizen Kane)
…As well as any number of unique weapons,
letters, treasures, trophies, microfilms, charms, antidotes,
briefcases, serums, dossiers, rings, incriminating evidence, and
other pivotal objects of desire. Any time several character in your
story are focused on a single visible object which drives and
shaping all of their actions you’re using a MacGuffin.
Notice how many of these MacGuffins
provide the literal title for the story which features them. They
exist to provoke curiosity and focus attention. The other feature of
MacGuffins is that they often seem arbitrary, bizarre and valueless
outside the context of their narrative. How many of us would be
willing to die for the Indy's Ark of the Covenant,
Citizen Kane’s Rosebud, or
Strictly Ballroom's
big trophy for the Pan-Pacific Grand Prix Amateur Five Dance Latin
finals. Their worth is strictly situational, anchored in community
and communal values.
Hitchcock purists sometimes argue that
sentient objects like Helen of Sparta/Troy or Sauron’s One Ring
cannot
be MacGuffins because they
influence others, but I’d
argue that even if not literally inanimate, a MacGuffin is a charged
object with the primary function of focusing the actions of all the
other characters. Its function is indirect and intransitive: it only
exists to be wanted.
At the same time, even if MacGuffins lack
agency, I don’t believe all MacGuffins are inert; they morph and
poison, shift and tease. They cannot take action, but their inherent
charge and contextual value alters every beat in which they appear
with an inexorable magnetic pull.
MacGuffins tend to be more common in film
than fiction. Film exults in passive objects of desire: less time
wasted, fewer motives to navigate. The same cannot be said of a
book. In a book, passive objects of desire go stale quick and
fiction affords plenty of room for unpacking inanimate objects
beyond simply showing
them.
MacGuffins exist to excite and incite
action. They are objects of desire because they require a
subject to make stuff happen. Think of how many heists, fights, and
rescues appear onscreen and how few ambivalence, subtlety or
philosophical abstraction. Which is easier to film? For most of
Hollywood and its audiences, any story without a MacGuffin is
unfilmable and unwatchable.
This has had a profound impact on modern
storytelling.
By using a MacGuffin, filmmakers focus
intention and attention on something you can capture with a camera.
In any story, characters can pursue things that are be abstract,
complex, contextual. Because the camera needs something to shoot,
abstraction doesn’t work on film and only rarely works in fiction.
What a MacGuffin really does for film is make a character’s actions
visible.
Authors should harness that audience
expectation whenever possible. Giving your characters a specific
target will keep scenes escalating and tactics shifting throughout a
story.
As it happens, genre fictioneers already
have already a perfectly useful word for MacGuffin and although it’s
less evocative, our term is simpler, clearer, and infinitely more
practical. What Hitchcock called a MacGuffin, most writers call a goal.
All of the character’s actions occur in
pursuit of the goal and individual scenes show them working to
accomplish it in stages.
Goals represent the
desirable future. Even if you cannot find a way to
make it tangible and interactive, a character goal needs to be:
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Challenging enough to sustain your story throughout its length.
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Significant enough to attract character attention and to inspire escalating risks.
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Relateable enough that everyone can grasp the character’s need to pursue it.
Novelists aren’t usually worried about
creating a filmable object for characters to pursue. Fiction is more
internal, subjective, and psychological so authors don’t need to
automatically resort to the shameless cinematic device of a
MacGuffin. In point of fact, most books that translate well into
film do exactly that, but MacGuffins aren’t
intrinsic
to fiction.
Nevertheless, modern audiences have
little patience for elaborate or subtle goals. They come by it
honestly because a steady diet of MacGuffins has taught them to
crave stories that show them what to want, clearly and directly. A
MacGuffin is literally, physically visible and a character Goal
might not be. Herein lies one of the primary differences between
film and fiction.
Since an action is an intentional event
which makes another event possible in order to achieve a goal, a
goal must be achievable. A
vague or unachievable goal leaves your character with nothing to do
moment to moment, because they have no clear intention, can take no
steps, and accomplish no changes. Their actions and tactics will
lead them nowhere in particular.
As Aristotle might say, will this character’s actions lead to happiness? The goal is the form that happiness takes, and because it is abstract, it shares many fundamental characteristics of Hitchcock’s MacGuffin. Like a MacGuffin, a goal…
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only exists to be wanted and has no agency.
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cannot directly affect the character.
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provides a source of energy for the character.
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focuses all of the character’s actions.
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derives its value from context.
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points characters in a direction.
What a character wants gives their action
and tactics a trajectory. For plotters that makes your outline a
snap, and for pantsers it gives you a solid point upon which to
riff.
Originally published as a lecture for Romance University.
If you wish to republish this article, just drop me a line.
