MCGUFFIN

noun Also written MacGuffin (Lifestyle and Leisure) A device used in a film or work of fiction whereby some fact or activity seems all-important to the characters involved while actually only providing an excuse for the plot as a whole; the thing which absorbs the characters and misleads the audience in this way. Etymology: The word was invented by the film director Alfred Hitchcock in the thirties in relation to the film The Thirty-Nine Steps; when interviewed by Franúois Truffaut in the sixties, he claimed that he always liked to use a McGuffin in his films: The theft of secret documents was the original MacGuffin. So the 'MacGuffin' is the term we use to cover all that sort of thing: to steal plans or documents, or discover a secret, it doesn't matter what it is. And the logicians are wrong in trying to figure out the truth of a MacGuffin, since it's beside the point. The only thing that really matters is that in the picture the plans, documents, or secrets must seem to be of vital importance to the characters. To me, the narrator, they're of no importance whatsoever. The word itself may be derived from guff; it was apparently borrowed from a Scottish joke involving a man carrying a mysterious parcel on a train; but the joke may also be a McGuffin in its own right. History and Usage: Although Hitchcock had been using the word for several decades, McGuffin did not start to appear more widely in film criticism until the early eighties, when it suddenly acquired a more general currency, and was used to refer to the underlying impetus for the plot of novels and television series as well as horror films. There's a funny scene in which Wilder, looking for a gold coin--the film's McGuffin--ventures into the bathroom of a beautiful woman villain and encounters her in the shower. Sydney Morning Herald 27 July 1989, p. 14 Maddeningly, neither the deal nor its unmaking are anything but McGuffins in this misfiring comedy. Los Angeles Times 22 June 1990, section F, p. 6