Beyond That Briefcase: MacGuffins in Movies
Weekly Rhapsody: MacGuffins and Red Herrings
This is going to be a quick post building on a Note I wrote earlier. Friends, my eyes are sensitive right now and I need to get away from the screen, but I also made a commitment to you, and to myself, to write every day.
Two of the most famous and well-executed MacGuffins in cinema are the briefcase from Pulp Fiction and the Ark of the Covenant from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The briefcase in Pulp Fiction is nothing more than literally A Thing That Must Be Delivered. In the end, the shape and form of the thing matters little, it could have been a box, it could have been a pencil, it could have been Vince himself.
Even the fact that the briefcase contains Mr. Wallace's soul isn't important because Marsellus Wallace would have cared just as much about his GrubHub delivery. The man might be a lot of things, but we know what he's not. It's all about the journey and the weird shit that happens along the way.
Now, when we look at the Ark, not only is it a MacGuffin (Indiana Jones is always about the MacGuffin), but it turns out that the MacGuffin is also always a Deus Ex Machina, because the power represented by or contained within the relic ends up doing something to save the day, whatever that means at the end of the movie1.
One trope is a powerful motivator. But when we mix two tropes then things are richer, more complex, more delicious to our story-craving brains.
As the screen is playing havoc with my eyes, the in-depth look I have planned around red herrings will have to wait. However, I will say this…if you want an excellent course in how to successfully employ red herrings, there are two things you can study: The Sixth Sense, and Scooby-Doo. Both are well-executed, straightforward examples of the skillful application of this principle.
I’ll be back tomorrow with a breakdown of some other great red herrings, as well as some tragic failures, and ways to add them to your own narratives!
My husband and I had a discussion on the way home about whether, in this particular instance of Raiders, if Indiana Jones himself isn’t actually the MacGuffin, because his presence through the movie affects...nothing. The Nazis got the Ark. They had it. And they opened it. The only thing that might have been different is which Top Men ended up with it after that.