The Wit’s Guide to MacGuffins

Or, plot stickers

“If it’s McMade from what I think it’s McMade from, I don’t want to chase it to the ends of the McEarth!”

When you find the MacGuffin, you win. When you define the MacGuffin, you lose. This gauzy gimmick is what the characters in the story care about; all you care about is that they care about something. In Alfred Hitchcock’s famous anecdote, it’s “an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.” Once a lack of Caledonian big cats is established, there’s no such thing.

“My dear boy, forget about the motivation. Just say the lines and don’t trip over the furniture.”
— Noël Coward

But if we did care about the MacGuffin, we’d want to know that the original 1883 anecdote (as unearthed by Garson O’Toole at Quote Investigator) referenced imaginary snakes as seen by a hallucinating alcoholic. Everyone knows that the enemy of the cobra is the mongoose, and it follows that the imaginary ones are much cheaper to feed. These imaginary mongeese then evolved into MacGuffins.

“It is more comfortable to fear God than to fear nothingness.”
— Edward Bond

Is the Holy Grail a MacGuffin? In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, yes, because God tells them to get it but not why. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, no, because (spoiler alert) it cures Dr. Jones, Sr. from his wounds if not his Scottish accent. By Hitchcock’s definition, the gewgaw’s only attribute is desirability. It shouldn’t do anything.

“Without some goal and some motivation to reach it, no man can live.”
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The final Mission: Impossible proves that overthinking the MacGuffin ruins everything. In Part III, known to diehard fans as The Pretty Good One With Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hunt chases the Rabbit’s Foot. It was not the actual foot of a rabbit, and that was enough! But then in last summer’s Way-Too-Long One With The Biplane Dogfight, they explained the Rabbit’s Foot! You see, it contained the source of the Podkova module in the sunken Russian submarine, which in turn gives the holder of the cruciform key power over The Entity, which in turn made a 90-minute movie last 170 minutes for no reason.

“Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money.”
— Danny DeVito as Mickey Bergman in David Mamet’s Heist

There’s a compelling argument to be made that money is the true MacGuffin. George Ainslie, a psychiatrist and behavioural economist, makes that case in a very readable paper on addiction and regrettable choices. He gets right to the weird thing about gambling as a compulsive behaviour: Spending money for a chance of getting more money (with the likelihood of losing it) is illogically direct. (I too got stuck on this paradox in The Wit’s Guide to Gambling, and some part of my brain is still spinning on the roulette table.) If you simply must have cocaine or hot fudge sundaes or hot cocaine fudge sundaes, the immediate pleasure and later pain are in different modalities. And so Ainslie concludes that money is a MacGuffin because it’s “the object of a hedonic game that is justified by its instrumental believability but which is actually shaped by its production of satisfaction in its own right.” Ergo, capitalism is a Hitchcock movie.

“My life has a superb cast; I just can’t figure out the plot.”
— Ashleigh Brilliant

Take a moment to peel your blown mind off the wall, then consider this: All plots are MacGuffins. The essayist Michel Montaigne said as much in his essay “On Books,” wherein he complained about the overstuffed plays of his time and praised the poet Horace, for “the perfections and beauties of his style of expression make us lose our appetite for his subject … and so fills our soul with his charms, that we forget those of his plot.” There was definitely a reason all those people were doing things, but we’ve transcended that. In the end, it wasn’t what they did but how they did it.

“Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.”
— Stephen King

I found that bit in Lewis Hyde’s A Primer For Forgetting, who used as his ultimate proof point The Clock, Christian Marclay’s 24-hour supercut of movies in which characters reference the exact time at which you’re watching. “Thousands of scenes go by, none of them offering the plot they once inhabited,” Hyde writes. “The pleasures of cinema are not at all diluted by that absence, not diluted because plot is a forgettable MacGuffin.”

“Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”
— Kurt Vonnegut

So if plot is just a vehicle for escapism, MacGuffin is its official airline. No one gets you there faster! But if that’s a lion-trapping apparatus in your carry-on, we’re going to have to ask you to check it.

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“No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”
— W.H. Auden

This whole business sorta reminds me of that old line that people will forget what you said but never how you made them feel. Which may be a uniquely self-proving maxim, as everyone credits it to Maya Angelou but it was actually said by the forgotten Carl W. Buehner. How does that make you feel? And next week?

Get Wit Quick No. 355 can almost remember when the Toronto Star ran a contest to decide what was in the Pulp Fiction briefcase. Readers suggested it was E.T.’s finger, the ear from Reservoir Dogs, O.J.’s other glove, Danny De Vito holding a flashlight, the Caramilk secret, or the Oscar in Quentin Tarantino’s future. The winning entry was from Art Coulbeck of Mississauga, who suggested it was a “nuclear homage to Robert Aldrich and Mickey Spillane” based on the movie Kiss Me Deadly. The briefcase pictured above was made by a propmaster for a nerd convention, though it went viral as though it were the actual Pulp prop. This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. The ❤️ below is your MacGuffin, the thing you make a mad dash to tap every week without ever really knowing why.