Where it sits
Load-bearing and hollow at the same time — which is a genuinely strange thing for a plot element to be.
Tell it apart
What it doesn't mean
He credited the screenwriter Angus MacPhail. Hitchcock was the populariser, not the inventor — and he said so, repeatedly, which makes the misattribution slightly ungracious.
A MacGuffin motivates the characters and is structurally load-bearing — remove it and there's no plot. A red herring exists to mislead the audience and can be cut without consequence. They're near-opposites.
What it really means
Hitchcock told the same story for thirty years, and it's the clearest definition anyone has managed.
Two men are on a train. One notices a package on the luggage rack and asks what it is. That's a MacGuffin, says the other. What's a MacGuffin? 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.
The joke is the definition. A MacGuffin is whatever the characters are chasing, and its actual nature is irrelevant — because the story isn't about the thing, it's about the chasing. The uranium, the microfilm, the formula, the unopened briefcase. Remove it and the plot collapses; explain it and nothing improves.
Which makes it the exact inverse of a red herring, though the two get swapped constantly. A red herring misleads the audience and could be cut without damage. A MacGuffin misleads nobody — everyone can see it's a pretext — and cannot be cut, because it's the engine.
One credit worth restoring. Hitchcock didn't coin it. The word is credited to the screenwriter Angus MacPhail, and Hitchcock — who told the lion-trap anecdote at Columbia in 1939 and again to Truffaut in 1966 — was its populariser rather than its inventor. He explained it so memorably that the attribution fell off somewhere along the way — which is a fairly MacGuffin-ish fate for the word's actual origin.
Where it comes from
an arbitrary Scottish surname
The surname behind the word is Ulster Irish — Mc- 'son of' + dubh 'black' + Fionn 'fair-headed' — though other accounts trace it instead to 'guff', meaning something trivial or worthless. Either way the choice was arbitrary: Angus MacPhail coined the term and Hitchcock made it famous, which is itself the joke.
- 1939
Hitchcock explains the MacGuffin in a Columbia University lecture, using the Scottish train anecdote.
- 1966
He retells the identical story to François Truffaut, fixing it permanently in film criticism.
In real life
- The jewel-encrusted bird statuette in The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett's novel, 1930; John Huston's film, 1941): everyone lies, cheats and kills to get it, and it hardly matters what it actually is.
- In Hitchcock's Notorious (1946), Nazis in Rio hide uranium ore in wine bottles. It gives the spies a reason to be in the cellar, but the film is about the people, not the uranium.
- In Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959), spies are smuggling microfilm of government secrets hidden inside a small statue. The film never needs to say what the secrets are.
- The briefcase in Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) is fought over and guarded at gunpoint, and its contents are never revealed. That it is wanted is all the story needs.
- A simple test: in a heist script, swap the diamonds for the hard drive or the recipe. If nothing else in the story has to change, you are looking at a MacGuffin.
Questions
Q01What's the train anecdote?
Two men on a train. One asks about a package on the luggage rack. The other says 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.' The point is that the MacGuffin is nothing — it just has to be something the characters want.
Q02Is it McGuffin or MacGuffin?
Both are attested; MacGuffin is the standard form. The name was chosen arbitrarily, which is consistent with the concept.
Q03Does it have to be an object?
No — a document, a formula, a person or an entirely undefined goal all work, provided the audience doesn't need to care what it actually is. The briefcase in Pulp Fiction is never opened on screen, and doesn't need to be.