I can’t remember when I first heard Angus MacPhail’s word “MacGuffin”, a term for a plot-fungible object at the center of a story. In the early days of Hollywood, Pearl White called it the “weenie”. Cultures that strive for Capital-A Art might have given it a fancy name, like l’objet d’le coup (I made that up.) But lucky for us, Hitchcock popularized the term MacGuffin. I like it because “MacGuffin” is itself a placeholder (like “Whatshisname” or “Bugalugs”) and reflects the object’s anonymity.

The Wikipedia page on the word “MacGuffin” reveals some disagreement over whether the audience has to care about the MacGuffin. I think the distinction in the argument hinges on whether one is talking about the structure of the story or the ability of the story to grab the audience.

From the standpoint of structure, if a story stays the same whether everyone is chasing a box of diamonds or a bottle of super rocket fuel or a briefcase of Illudium Phosdex, I think you have a proper MacGuffin. You can swap the Maltese Falcon for the Burmese Lion and have the same story. Brigid O’Shoughnessey is still going over for it and Joel Cairo still smells of gardenia. That’s what I meant by the admittedly pompous term “plot-fungible”. On the other hand, you can’t swap the Maltese Falcon for the Eiffel Tower. That has to be a different story.

But from the standpoint of story telling–capturing the attention of the readers/viewers–I think the object does need to connect to the audience. If it doesn’t hook into their view of the world, they can’t identify with the characters pursuing it. Westerners can identify with Caspar Gutman waxing romantic about the Templars. We can imagine him drawn into Eastern romanticism about the first Dalai Lama, pursuing an alternate MacGuffin called the Lotus Of Tibet. But I don’t think we could put enough romanticism into Peter Minuit’s purchase of Manhattan Island for $24 to make anyone drool convincingly over the Bronx Rabbit. It just isn’t “the stuff that dreams are made of.”

My personal favorite MacGuffin is Illudium Phosdex, the shaving cream atom. It’s silly. It’s absurd. And we need it desperately because Earth’s supply is alarmingly low. Meg and I use the phrase all the time–“The refrigerator’s supply of coffee creamer is alarmingly low.” In my personal head-canon, the briefcase in Pulp Fiction contains Earth’s last 600 grams of Illudium Phosdex, which Marcellus Wallace needs to shave his head (as indicated by the band-aid).

My second favorite MacGuffin is the plaid bag in What’s Up Doc? The way I look at it, there are two MacGuffins (the diamonds and the secret documents with conflict) and two non-MacGuffins (the rocks and the clothes without conflict), but since all four are packaged in identical plaid bags, the bags become ober-MacGuffins that drive the hijinks.

Several articles on MacGuffins cite Rosebud in Citizen Kane as an example, but I disagree. Yes, Rosebud is fungible–it could have been anything from [that-period-in-his-life]. But Rosebud isn’t involved the plot. It doesn’t motivate any central characters. It’s irrelevant for all but a few seconds of the film. Rosebud is a contrived mystery that brackets the biopic and provides an emotional punch. Without Rosebud, the final moment of the story is boring: “…and the old shit died. The End.” Rosebud is an artistic flourish, not a MacGuffin.

My least favorite MacGuffin is unobtainium. Even the people grinding out cheap weekly serials in the 1930’s came up with better names. The name doesn’t even work, because they’re actually obtaining it. They would have done better to call it “maguffium”. “Why is it called that?” “We don’t know. Does it matter?” Then at least they could have gotten a couple of points for a decent in-joke and a pun.