A MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin) is “a plot element that catches the viewers’ attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction.”
Sometimes, the specific nature of the MacGuffin is not important to the plot such that anything that serves as a motivation serves its purpose. The MacGuffin can sometimes be ambiguous, completely undefined, generic or left open to interpretation.
Y’know how, at first, Psycho seems like it’s going to be a heist movie about Janet Leigh’s embezzling then going on the lam? Yeah. That.
Hitch was the master of the MacGuffin:
I remember using MacGuffin in a sentence while on the phone with my long-distance college boyfriend in 1997. I was talking about the then-new tendency of the Simpsons writers to front a lot of their episodes with a MacGuffin. He was a film major, so when I used the term, he was suitably awed.
He was less awed five months later when he called and broke up with me immediately after the season premiere, “The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson.” When I see that episode now, I think of how it was taken out of syndication post-September 11, and then I think about how Lee Kravitz waited to dump me until after it was over.
Sure, it’s funny NOW.
